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Google Enterprise demonstrates maturity with new release process and Google Docs discussions
Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Angela Ashenden
Since the launch of Google Apps Premium Edition (now called Google Apps for Business) in 2007, Google has been blazing a trail in the SaaS-based enterprise collaboration market focusing on making small, regular software updates, in place of the more traditional 12 month+ release cycles which we are used to with on-premise software. This has been a major differentiator for Google, and has won the company increasing numbers of business customers who find this incremental approach to new capabilities as much more manageable (both for users and for IT) than big bang updates. However, for many large organisations, this approach is simply too “realtime”, and doesn’t give them the opportunity they need to manage and prepare for the introduction of such new features, particularly when they are released on a weekly basis. So in order to address this problem, Google today announced the introduction of a new release process for such customers, which creates a short buffer between the release of the new features and their availability as part of the customer’s Google Apps deployment. In addition to the existing Rapid Release track, Google is introducing the Scheduled Release track, which will aggregate each week’s updates into a single release and provide a week’s notification to administrators in advance of those features becoming available on their domain. Initially you will only be able to choose a single release track option for each domain, although as some customers use a separate “test” domain they will be able to choose the Rapid Release for the test domain, and the Scheduled release track for the production domain, allowing testing of the new features prior to the full release. What this announcement indicates is a growing level of maturity in Google Enterprise’s enterprise strategy, as the company gains sufficient exposure within large organisations to recognise the importance of such requirements within the large enterprise environment. The company has been careful to balance the need for some predictability for IT organisations with the need to maintain the differentiation it enjoys through its existing rapid release process, and I would expect other SaaS vendors to now consider a similar approach, particularly those targeting larger organisations.
Also today, Google has announced a new discussions feature for Google Docs. Taking the existing comments capability to a new level, the new feature enables realtime discussion directly in the context of a document, while leveraging all the existing capabilities of Google Docs, such as realtime editing of the document, and visibility of who is online and viewing the document right now. While the first release does not extend to fully threaded comments (comments are displayed sequentially under a discussion heading, with no indenting for sub-comments), it does include some interesting features, such as the ability to mark discussions as “resolved”, the ability to subscribe to discussions and and then submit comments back to the discussion via email, and Twitter-like @mentions where people are notified (again via email) when a comment is directed at them. There is clearly a great deal of scope for improving this feature, but – I think wisely – Google has taken the approach of starting simple, and allowing customers to use and get to know the tool before complicating it with a range of sophisticated enhancements. I also think this is a significant development for Google Docs – while there have been continuous enhancements since it first emerged in 2006 (following Google’s acquisition of Writely creators, Upstartle), none have really visibly changed the way in which the tool can be used; Discussions for Google Docs however brings a little “Google Wave flavour” into the product, progressing the online, realtime document collaboration concept.
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Posted in Collaboration