A Visit to Google Makes Us Think...

David and I recently went to a breakfast at Google’s cool offices in NYC, at Chelsea Market. Here is some good info on the Google presence in NYC.

The event focused on Google Enterprise Apps, co-sponsored by venerable NYC IT consultants BlueWolf. Kristin Shevis, Google’s Director Northeast Google Enterprise presented, along with several other Google and BlueWolf staffers. Really good turnout, looked to me like about 100 companies present. Obviously a hot topic. A couple of excellent case studies were presented, with a focus primarily on cost savings. In addition to the formal case studies, during Q and A, several members of the audience actually answered questions from other attendees, primarily about enterprise Google mail services. It didn’t appear that anyone in the room had actually deployed non-email apps on an enterprise basis (i.e., instead of Microsoft Office)… but there was great interest. The applications are still pretty basic, but for a lot of uses, they are quite adequate.

Google documents are about collaboration. As an outside observer, beyond the cost savings, this is the primary advantage in using Google Apps. Google documents can be edited by more than one person simultaneously (actually, up to 10 people, according to Google); Spreadsheets can be edited by up to 50 people simultaneously; they can also be shared with up to 200 collaborators and viewers. Presentations can be edited by 10 people simultaneously, out of a total of 200 who can be either collaborators or viewers.

Which led David and I, during our fifteen-block power walk back to Mimeo’s NYC headquarters, to discuss some of the challenges that might be faced in professionally printing Google documents, which are “dynamic” for lack of a better word. How do you print a dynamic, collaborative document? It is clear that while the Google apps are not particularly competitive with “desktop” applications right now, someday they will be, and in the foreseeable future. Formatting is pretty weak in Google Apps right now. Control of printing is even weaker, which is somewhat surprising because it does appear in other areas that Google has some sophisticated technology for handling PDF files. I hope someone is thinking about this at Google, because there clearly will be a need for professional printing in years to come, it isn’t going to be eliminated by these collaboration tools— demand will increase for many document types coming out of these apps.

Furthermore, what does the new document model look like? I ask this because Google is not the only company working hard to put document creation, collaboration and management “in the Cloud.” There is, of course, the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010, which recently got some splash in the media and apparently, according to hype, will be a focus at WPC09, Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference, which begins on Monday July 13th, in New Orleans; click here for the details.

Online office suite developer Zoho announced a couple of weeks ago that they have created a seamless API integration with Microsoft SharePoint, which I haven’t had a chance to look at in depth yet.

We will be looking at all of this very closely here, and would love to hear your thoughts on these new developments.