After unveiling Google Apps to the masses many years ago, it looks like the search engine giant has finally decided to expand its official catalogue by including a variety of other services ranging from Google Voice to even Blogger.
Starting today, customers worldwide can access a full spectrum of services from Google—including more than 60 productivity-boosting applications that extend far beyond any traditional software suite.
Coupled with the ability for administrators to provide different sets of applications to different groups of users, the possibilities for empowering workers in new ways are remarkable. For example, you could equip your marketing team with Picasa Web Albums so they can collect and share photos from customer appreciation events, and let that team publish your company’s blog with Blogger. Services like iGoogle and Alerts, on the other hand, may be broadly useful, and could be enabled for your whole organization. (Google Small Business Blog)
Despite the fact that companies and not-for-profit organizations can already install a variety of third party apps from the market place, there were not many Google services available for users, which (truth be told) was rather frustrating.
The edition of extra services like Picasa Albums, Blogger and Google Voice should help the search giant compete better against rivals like Microsoft and Facebook (both who have been tag teaming Google recently).
Google Apps is currently available for free, although users wanting greater security can purchase their premium services for $50/year per user.
Originally posted on November 18, 2010 @ 2:16 pm