The hidden cost of Google Apps
Cheap software can become pricey when the learning curve eats into your business’s productivity. Have you tried out Google Apps? What do you think?
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DiggWiping cache isn’t even necessary. Google does make the one assumption that since you never signed out that you are still using their services. All it takes is clicking that one link and the next person that happens to hop on can sign in and use the service. When using any kind of service, there is always adjustment needed, just take a couple of seconds, remain calm and look around the program or web page for some clues to how you can solve the issues, If it cannot be resolved look on support pages. The key to using anything new is to act resourceful rather than falling back on old habits since most things aren’t exactly alike.
This article was hilarious. It kept talking about Google was confused. Clearly, the staff at his company were confused. “We had to clear out our entire cache just to get this thing to work”. As if clearing your cache is like demolishing a house, or migrating an MS Exchange environment. It amazes me that he didn’t just select the ‘logout’ button available on any Google page I’ve ever seen.
He also claims that Google was sending him his colleagues invites after acknowledging that he had been logged in as the wrong user.
Most amazing was the supposed confusion between personal Gmail accounts, and work accounts accessible with the /a at the end of the URL. If that’s confusing to anyone, they shouldn’t even have a job, let alone one that requires using a computer.
There’s really no such thing as a perfect software, cloudware or whatever you call it. Adjustments has to be made either in budget or business process, or both. We are using Google apps, we have integrated google apps for our clients, some with more than a 100 accounts and we haven’t had any major complains.
Change-fearing end users are the biggest problem with Google Apps. That and a big ol’ gulp of the Microsoft kool-aid keeps users in abject fear of anything different.
I tried to move a 400-seat company over to the Premier flavor of Google Apps once. The cost savings over other alternatives was ridiculous – getting the capital to complete that move was a HUGE win for an Exchange-weary IT department. Once we got everyone through the pilot program and had a good idea that this was going to work, we launched training initiatives, workshops, and other events to get the users excited about a very fundamental shift in communication strategy. What we failed to realize is how fundamental that change really was – despite significant training efforts, the users rebelled in the extreme. There were some advocates, but the much louder and angrier group of opponents got the most attention.
The most telling argument I can recall from the entire fiasco has to be a conversation I had with a high-ranking executive. We were arguing about GApps, and the gist from the exec was that IT was very short-sighted in making this call and that we looked like idiots to our customers for choosing such a ridiculously risky solution for corporate mail. The exec went on to state that the pain of training users on Google Apps was both painful and costly. The exec ended the argument by stunning me with the statement that he would rather have spent FOUR TO FIVE TIMES MORE on Exchange over GApps. I had no response to that – I was literally rendered speechless by the short-sightedness of that.
I left that company (thankfully) and understand that they have since reverted back to a hosted Exchange server. It’s amazing to me how people can be so brainwashed – email is email is email…I can’t fathom how two people can use the same product so vastly differently. Sure, there are shortcomings in Google Apps – I’ll grant that willingly. I don’t like everything about it, but the value of not hosting email locally on Exchange overshadows those shortcomings in a big way.
It’s a shame others are unwilling to see it the same way.
Adobe’s suite is acrobat.com not acrobot.com. Acrobat’s ConnectNow is quite possibly the greatest piece of free software, (that won’t cause compatibility issues like Google Apps & Microsoft do) that has been offered.
Oh, and where are your analysis of Skype, ooVoo, OpenOffice as free alternatives?
I love Google Apps! Maybe his people have too much time to play and he needs to cut his staff and they would have to really get productive and stop whining. Wahh wahhh wahh…wahh Go back to MS. How about doing an article on how difficult it is for them to transition to Vista and MS Office 2007? If he thinks he has problems with Google, lets see how his team does with that change!!
We haven’t had the problems the author posted because:
a) we mapped all the Google Apps to subdomains on orangeandbronze.com (i.e. to access mail, you type in mail.orangeandbronze.com and not necessarily mail.google.com/a/orangeandbronze.com — the hard parts have already been done behind the scenes for you);
b) there is clear branding on our apps, as we configured apps to use our company logo (found under Domain Settings > Appearance), and we have a different color scheme for the sign in box color, visually different from Google’s sign in box; and
c) our workforce is more tech-savvy (we’re a software consulting/development shop).
We haven’t had the problem of differentiating identity, as far as I can tell. And on the sysad side (who do the support for it), we haven’t been spending time on fixing problems with Google Apps for more than an hour a month, at most (and this is a back-of-the-envelope estimate, I may be underestimating)
I guess the problem with the author’s set up is with branding their Google Apps instance. Just establish a strong branding for your instance. Essentially — the preparation before roll-out of the service.
However, again, I might be underestimating things, as I don’t hear of
any problems so far.
What software was used to write this piece? Apparently it doesn’t have spelling or grammar checkers.
We have been using it for years….Not sure why the author of this article couldn’t get past the “issues” that are really not issues if you are a tech or have a competent IT staff or consultant.
The key problem mentioned in this article is easliy mitigated by tying your company domain name to google apps. So you just access email at mail.company.com not mail.google.com/a
This is a free service and easy to setup from Google.
Seriously?! This is SO FUNNY! My group was a part of this project before the beta testing started and I have to say, we have been using it for years AND NEVER HAD AN ISSUE WITH THIS! hahahaha. I think it’s funny that people still allow their browsers to hold cache, they log in with the same user names in their windows environment and they don’t understand how to use a password manager (which also will save you from Key Loggers, etc.)
My goodness! If you have no serious experience on the web, you have NO BUSINESS writing articles about Google! HAHAHAHA! This is a FUNNY article. I can’t believe that people actually can find that many things to gripe about on a system that can be used for free and with so many options. My offices are completely virtual with over 45 staff. Google, Airset, Facebook and one other app for file storage do everything.
I highly recommend Google, you have to be DUMB not to love a price point of FREE!
hahahaha
These guys need to give up on cloud computing and leave it to people who can actually see the future…
d
Who wrote this article? Have they just started using the internet. My office uses the free edition of Google and we have it branded with our logo, domain and even the email is hosted on google. If you have a look at our start page at http://start.bullzgroup.com it’s hosted and run on google. My employees run it, they all have access from home, iPhone, at work. Google is god.
Not sure how Google Apps is too complicated. It does everything you need for business communication and coordination well: email and calendar. If URLs and identities are the issue, just bookmark them separately, or have employees add a quick link to the desktop.Docs is nice to use for viewing, quick editing and sharing, but I’ve found it’s not critical to running a business and many times people we’ll use OpenOffice or Office to work with documents. We’ve found combining Google Apps with tools like Dropbox (getdropbox.com) deliver everything we need.
If his employees are having a hard time with getting the url’s correct, it sounds like the Google Apps isn’t set up correctly in the companies zone records. I’ve set this up for numerous schools to just go to mail.xxxschool.org and even teachers have been able to remember that. Tou can also set up docs/apps.xxxschool.org, calendar.xxxschool.org and others. It’s a no brainer if it’s set up correctly.
Another suggestion would be to set up a web page with all the correct links on the company intranet or even on the individual computers as their home page.
excel is the best program ever?
my assistant and I share the same computer so our logins get messed up?
Are you serious? This is one the most uninformed articles I have read in a while.
Appirio has executed successful Google Apps migrations for extremely large companies. The cost savings have been in the millions.
So the question really is “what’s different?” How did a company of thousands migrate users successfully while Blum had near rebellion with 12?
The answer: a carefully planned rollout and an understanding that you are changing the game for your workers. Our customer took the time to identify champions and put forth a thoughtful communications and training campaign. They made change exciting and fun for their community. The results spoke for themselves. The support war room that had been planned to be open for several weeks after the deployment was closed because of lack of issues within 2 days.
<a href=”http://www.appirio.com/blog/2008/11/what-is-cost-of-google-apps.php”?Read the full story on our blog….
The peopleover at blumsday may be confused in general and one would have to assume they are not intelligent enough to remember the difference between their personal and work passwords. They also dont understnad the first thing about working with computers if they cant figure out how to log in and out of chat. Basically this was a stupid “dig” at google apps for no good reason.
who ever say that Google apps is complicated, you guys remember the first time you where using outlook and im pretty sure that you guys dont know how to deal with a Microsoft server and i cant image with a exchange server that can cost a couple thousand dollars the only problem here is cause you guys don’t know how two use it you said that is no good
if you can no remember the links how you expect to use it in different computers? if you can remember that then you guys need help just remember your start page address and that’s it google is the best and remember the most important thing “IS FREE” but still you need some body how knows it set it up
We love all Google products. The members of our family that own businesses love it also. Google continues to improve and create great products. The one item that 90% of our friends and family wish to see Google implement asap is an online auction platform. We have high hopes they are working on it and will replace Feebay almost overnight as the #1 auction site.
http://www.searchtheentirecraigslist.com
I’ve liked some of Google’s products from the outset, particularly their consumer offerings. But I don’t think Google has a clue about Enterprise/Business products. I think when it comes to business apps, Microsoft offerings are far superior than anything out there.
[Quote from your article: Constant change does have the advantage of driving the dead wood from the shop. If somebody is signaling they can't handle Google Apps, what else are they are not cut out for in the business?]
Have you considered that if you are not willing to provide the right tools to your employees for doing their job, perhaps they think you are not cut out for running a business?
Google app is awesome! I use google sites, gmail, doc. It is so easy to use. The chat feature inside gmail si cool.
I have my personal gmail, and a googe app account. No confusing at all. Just keep 2 bookmarks. Sometimes I start a Firefox for personal stuff, and a Google Chrome for google app.
This whole article is very very misleading. Could be hired by Microsoft to write this. The whole argument against google app is that people need to remember too different URLs in order to use personal mail and corporate mail. Is this funny? What you want? A single sign-on feature? I like to separate my personal mail with my business mail.
The key problem is privacy. Google Apps is not HIPAA-secure. For me that’s the end of the discussion since I work at a medical school.
The organization I work for has been using Google Apps for 5 months now (34 users). I can say that it has definitely increased our internal collaboration as well as our email availability. Having the same user interface from any location is quite useful. Up time has been outstanding. Additionally, Google has just extended their SLA (Service Level Agreement) of 99.9% to the Education Edition/Non Profit.
It has not been without hiccups though. As the only support staff, I do spend more time dealing with support issues over our previous email system, although these are decreasing quickly. Furthermore the contact engine for Google doesn’t like to import street address via uploads.
I have not noticed the username/cache problems the writer of the article discussed.
I would migrate to Google Apps again in a heartbeat. In a recent internal survey (done via Google Docs) the staff also supported this decision.
I’ve been using Google Apps for over a year now and love it to bits. I think this article over emphasized how “hard” it is to use and forgot to mention how much time you can save with the email search feature… You may not realize what you are missing if you still use outlook. The enormous space is also a huge plus. I run three small businesses online, each one uses apps, and I have never had a problem getting accounts confused – http://www.cleantechauthority.com
google doc are very easy to use. If your employees can’t manage the simple task of signing out and logging in, or remembering their work passwords than, well what can I say. As someone who has a small shop myself – 20 employees, I have had LESS headaches than with microsoft, saved a LOT of money, and had big gains in productivity due to the collaborative features.
I have been evaluating Google Apps for our ad agency for about 7 months now. I think a better title of this article would be “Business Does Poor Job Rolling Out Groupware; Blames Groupware”.
Many of these problems the author experienced were self-inflicted. Poor user training, lack of controls (such as a corporate logo) that would prevent users from getting personal Google accounts confused with the company Google account.
And to say that Google Spreadsheet is “simply awful” compared to Excel is inaccurate. You could, however, say that it has far fewer features, but is quite intelligent about those it does have.
But I do appreciate this author’s heads up on potential issues that he ran into. It will help me ensure I don’t make those same mistakes.
When we roll-out, we’re going to give people the option of continuing to work in iCal/Outlook while they acclimate to Google and are purchasing synchronization applications to keep calendars and contacts in sync.
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Apparently Seth, your web editor, doesn’t know how to use basic web functions.
Google Apps too complicated? It’s very rare to hear that.
I’ve also heard of people complaining about the training it requires to switch to Google Apps. I’ve always recommended that if someone couldn’t figure out how to use Google Apps they should be fired for stupidity.