Google Apps to Meet iPhone at Texas University - Google Apps for Education and the Enterprise (
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In the meantime, ACU students will
continue to access the free Google Apps Education Edition from their laptops
and school desktops.
The suite includes the same apps as in the company's Standard Edition,
but Google removes any advertising and provides access to and support
for its APIs.
Google Postini security solutions are not included (though they are
available at a 66 percent discount). Moreover, the storage is 6.5GB instead of
the 25GB provided by the Premier Edition.
Roberts said after Gmail, Google Chat quickly became the application of
choice among students, with steady adoption of Docs and Spreadsheets over time.
The wildfire adoption is perhaps a testament to the popularity of Google
among today's college students, who grew up searching the Web on Google over
the last 10 years.
Much has been written about modest-sized companies using Google Apps in lieu
of or in addition to the traditional Microsoft Office and IBM
Lotus stacks, but the adopters with the most users may well be institutions of
higher learning.
Google won't provide specific figures as to how many universities and their
students and faculty are using Google Apps (though it's thought to be a few
thousand schools with hundreds of thousands of users) or how many users are
using each app.
Does Google know too much about its users? Click here to read more.
However, Jeff Keltner, business development manager for Google Apps for
Education, said Google is actively working on letting customers know what's
being done in those applications with Google Analytics.
It's true that Google isn't making the kind of money from its Google Apps Education
Edition as Microsoft makes from universities that use Office. But if the trend
of universities migrating from Microsoft to Google continues, and more schools
pair Google Apps with iPhones, it could prove to be a interesting comparison in
the future.
As universities require more computing power and storage, it's possible they
could eventually sign up for Google Apps Premier Edition at $50 per user per
year. Multiply that number by tens of thousands or even a million, and Google's
Enterprise business could see some
better returns in the next few years.
But in addition to having considerably more market share than
Google with its Apps, Microsoft also beats Google in enterprise-class capabilities.
Google has no SLAs (service-level agreements) to offer and nowhere near the same
service support, which it will have to work on if it plans to approach more
discerning business customers.
Messaging & Collaboration 
