Google Apps – Not only for customers who want to replace MS Office anymore

Earlier today, Google announced a new product called “Outlook Sync” an outlook add-on that lets organizations use Outlook as their main email client while connecting it to Google Apps in the back-end instead of Microsoft Exchange.

Some people might be surprised by such a move, after all Google has its own productivity suite – Google Docs, so why endorse MS Office?

When you think about Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible” (both in the consumer and enterprise space) you start realizing that Google does not share the same vision as Microsoft around building tools for the sake of the tools themselves, but rather focuses on the data organization and accessibility whereas the tools are just ways to help achieve that goal. So...if those tools happen to be MS Office or Outlook then Google will make sure to leverage that.

By using the Outlook sync product, users will start managing and organizing their emails, contacts and calendar items on Google Apps, this means that the Google platform will kick in to start helping users organizing their information, archiving it, making it accessible through Google search, on the web and so much more….

OffiSync for Microsoft Office aligns with the same strategy. Google built an integration with Outlook and OffiSync extends that to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The goal for OffiSync was to connect those MS Office applications to Google Apps and Google Docs and let users save their MS Office files on the Google back-end so they can access them from any computer, collaborate with others and organize it on Google’s platform.