Google Office launching this week
after almost two years of rumours, Google yesterday officially announced their plans on creating an online-office-suite. in a first step, well-known applications GMail, GTalk, GCalendar and GPage Creator will be offered under the brand ‘Google Apps for Your Domain‘. integration of word-processor Writely and Google Spreadsheet are expected to follow very soon. Google Apps will be ad-supported and therefor free of charge.
Google Apps works very similar to GMail for Domains, a product which has been in silent beta for some time now. oganizations using Google Apps are required to redirect the DNS-pointers of their domain to Google’s mail- and web-servers (the latter is only required for using Page Creator). Google clearly aims their communications-package at small and medium sized companies running on Microsoft Exchange or similar products (read Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab for some prophecies predictions on GApps impact).
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[...] according to this Yahoo! Finance-article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was elected to Apple’s board of directors earlier today. after announcing Google Apps, this looks like Google’s second slap in Microsoft’s face within a few days. Steve Jobs: “Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.” [...]
[...] while Google developers are still busy knitting together their various web-assets to form a defacto online-office suite, JotSpot might be a few steps ahead, offering a comprehensive collaboration suite for small/medium teams. JotSpot is based on a wiki-engine, spiced up with lots of additional mini-apps: [...]