The Online Office

I think we all knew it was coming and there have certain have been previous attempts to deliver the corner stone applications of word processing and spreadsheets online but they have all just been warm-ups compared Google's efforts. For a while now one could access and use Google Docs & Spreadsheets and in the usual Google fashion they have evolved the offering quietly and thoughtfully.

Then in the last year they have packaged the offering into Google Apps, which is in short an online office productivity suite with hosted email, single sign-on and swag of other online goodies. They have backed this up with a pricing model which appears simple and workable, basically a per user annual fee. Now this all very nice and in someways impressive especially considering the quality of the Google word processor and spreadsheet, but what got my attention is some of the other technologies Google are playing with at the same time.

Namely Google Gears, for those that don't know, the vision here is offline access to a web application, yes a local copy that can be synchronised back to the web application. Added to this what I consider one of the best if not the best API in the industry, it does not take intellectual giant to see where all this is going. Granted that Gears can not really be easily used for Docs and Spreadsheet because you need more a file system rather then a DB achieve this type of stuff but the seed has been planted.

For reasons I have stated above coupled by the fact there is just so much offered now by the Google API/s I think that anyone that is in the process of designing a productivity and/or collaboration application needs to consider how can they leverage the services that Google is offering.

I can hear all the objections now! Let me answer some of those questions:

Objection One.

One can not use or leverage the google services in a commercial application because you can't build a organisation off open source free stuff and service out there on the net, you need solid contractual terms that you can rest upon.

Well you actually do have this, each of the google services does have terms of use, which does facilitate their services being used in a commercial manner.

Objection Two.

We need some kind of SLA or assurance that they will provide these services and will be there tomorrow.

At the time of writing the market cap is 162Billion and more importantly they have a net profit margin of 27% which is based upon business model that they offers these service within, one can take a degree of comfort that they might outlast any application that relies upon them.

Objection Three.

They don't offer anything that we can't build ourselves.

At the risk of using a buzz word 'SOA', why reinvent the wheel?

Anyhow you get the idea, my core point is that Google is becoming more then a search engine and their services can be leveraged not only by web sites but by commercial corporate applications.

Leveraging Google

With the buzz about Web2.0, Mash up and SOA, I thought this would be an opportune time for a quick post on how an enterprise can leverage Google so that can go where no man has been before.

When we think Google we think search and rightly so they have had a major impact on that landscape, but search is not the only thing we should think. As of this moment there is probably some half dozen other major Google online applications which is not within the primary search space.

These applications which I am not including with the primary search space are Google Documents, Calendars, Base Data, AJAX, Checkout, Email and Blogger. If you include the rest like searching, mapping, ad words/sense, etc the list just sky rockets. What is more important is that Google have developed stable and well documented API's for these services.

Google clearly want folks to build applications that use their API, because these become additional channels, channels which are very sticky simple because once an organisation invest in learning and implementing an API they happen hang around for very long time. That said and understanding that one could spend a whole posting on the commercial issues, let move along to what we can do with this stuff.

Via the Google API's all of the Google Services have become 'Web Services' therefore a custom smart client or web application can be written to replace the existing heads. This in itself is not very interesting, given that the Google interface is so functional. The next step is integrating single services, like the Google Check service, which in short is a merchant facility for online transactions.

The immediate benefits are clear here, reduced development time and you get access to a bullet proof facility, but go a step further and use Google Spreadsheets Data API and you can easily hook-up a whole reporting and management system which produces Graphs on sale numbers and operational targets.

Another Cool combination would be to use the Gdata API to store the products online that you would like to sell. So all of a sudden you don't have to maintain your own database, Google is doing for you and somehow I think they can do a good job of it.

List of possible uses are almost unlimited, you could use blogger to data amongst a group of analysis, data which can read by a human eye as well as being machine readable. Anyhow as you can see the list could continue forever. As a thought exercise image a desktop smart client application that relied on web services for all it' s major components, how things would change not only in what we could do but also how quickly we could do it.