You must all be aware of the comedy of errors of the L.A. City Council Google Apps implementation. It is a classical egg on face story, which started with LA and Google showcasing it as a model implementation, where both would march into the gilded world of the cloud hand in hand with their head held high, help improve productivity, and save costs at that.

The happily ever after never happened.   

Rifts started to show when a memo was leaked to the public around the middle of 2010, with users reporting frustration with using the features. Normal glitches with an implementation of this scope – they laughed it off.

More issues emerged that year when Google missed its official implementation deadline, and the LAPD complained that it was uncomfrotable with Google Apps' security features. Minor delays, we were told. 

It started to get ugly late in 2011 with the LA City Council demanding a refund from Google for failing to meet security requirements. Mud flew back with Google claiming that the City had introduced enhanced security requirements at an advanced stage.

The final nail on the coffin came when the LA City Council voted to scale back Google for LAPD and shift back to Novell, the system they were trying to migrate off. To be fair, Google still keeps 17,000 non LAPD users in the City. 

Is that Novell's laugh I hear? With Microsoft adding its own snickers?

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I know, consumerization of IT has been a theme in the business market for a couple of years now, and I see it as a very healthy debate. Business software does indeed need to be made less clunky and more end user friendly. But to say that you can design a software for end users to connect with others, have fun, play games on, share that cool video and those pictures, have public conversations on – and simply plug into into business use – is taking the argument too far. 

For one, the security and policy needs of consumers and businesses vastly differ. If people start using Google + for business, be sure of a lot of disastrous "reply to all" moments. Here are a number of ways in which business and consumer needs differ, and why Google + can not be just plugged into business.

Permissions. On the one hand, you want to encourage information sharing across the organization, but it must be balanced with some information which must be constrained to some groups – legal, financial, private information. Again, within even the same group, level of access to information allowed to different people will differ according to role.

Multimedia vs. Documents. The onus on consumer groups is to share multimedia information, while in the business context it is more in textual form – word documents, spreadsheets, or specialized file formats. 

Collaboration vs. Sharing. Social networks like Google plus are geared for sharing of information, rather than multiple people working together on it, i.e., sharing vs. collaboration. Both needs exist in organizations where you may need to share content with others, but also work together on documents, projects etc. 

Another problem I have with Google + is that is does not integrate with other Google Apps modules. It is just a disjoint new feature. It may have some use cases for business, but do you want a disconnected new module where you lock part of your organizational information in?

I suspect not!

The top culprit for data loss is overwhelmingly user error, accounting for 63%. Trailing by a long way, the next leading cause was hacking, while 3% were accounted for by third party apps corrputing Google Apps (which ones?). In all cases, it was found that the data was irrecoverable after 5 days. Check out the infographic below:

Google continued with its spate of redesign efforts, and redesigned its Apps Status Dashboard, which communicates the uptime status of its Google Apps suite. According to Google, this new design reduces clutter and conveys information more efficiently to users. In the blog entry announcing the change, Google makes sure to point out that Google's dashboard "is visible to everyone on the Web–there’s no username or password required", in an obvious take on Microsoft Office 365's "Service Health Dashboard" which is accessible only after a login. 

Google's approach is a lot more confident, in putting its App status out there for everyone to see, unlike Office 365. Microsoft is understandably shy about Office 365, because its services have a bad uptime record and "Service Health Dashboard" itself has a reputation of going down with outages, spurning spoofs like the "Service Health Crashboard".

However, as Microsoft was quick to point out, offline access capabilities are severely limited. For one, offline Gmail access is a stripped down version of regular Gmail, and is accessible only through a specific version of Chrome used by less than 2% of browser users. On the other hand, users only get read only access to Google Docs online. 

Quite limited, one has to admit, but at least it is a start. It also represents a concession from Google that we are far from the fully online world that Google envisions. Offline access remains critical to most businesses. 

The video is very witty, and certainly worth a watch. Everyone is waiting with bated breath to see how Google responds. It did its own "Gmail intervention" video, but that is limp, and doesnt seem to be a direct response. See the video below and get a few chuckles. 

One sometimes needs to take a step back to get a clearer perspective of things. Till a few years back, Microsoft wouldn't so much as acknowledge Google's existence in the enterprise space. Now it has a page up on its main site, painstakingly explaining how Office 365 is better than Google Apps.

Although Microsoft continues to rubbish Google Apps being a threat in the enterprise market, the fact that Ballmer made a veiled but obvious-to-most reference to Google Apps in the star studded Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (watch between 2.15.00 and 2.19.00) , you can guess Google Apps is a concern for MS and its partners. 

One can also get a measure of the importance of the cloud communication and collaboration market, given the fact that the major thrust of Ballmer's presentation was "Office 365" and the "cloud". It is a wonder that a market which just a few years ago had a handful of small players like WebOffice, HyperOffice and Zoho, should now have all the resources and attention of a multi billion dollar gorilla like Microsoft. 

iCloud syncs all your information between your Apple devices and the web, quite seamlessly – email, contacts, calendars, documents, music, pictures or any other. Steve Jobs attempt to hook you to the Apple environment. 

To be fair, iCloud isn't really a business app, but more a personal online storing and syncing service. But it has a slight overlap in that it offers email, contact and calendar sync, functionality that is of great use to business users. Besides it also includes the capability to sync and manage documents between iPad, iPhone, Mac and the web – definitely a business application. Hence the inevitable comparisons with Google Apps.

This general, and increasingly chaotic market is being served by players which are similar only if the imagination is stretched to a breaking point – Google Apps, Office 365, Zoho, HyperOffice, Dropbox, Central Desktop, Box.net, IBM LotusLive, Chatter, Jive Software, Twiki, Socialtext, Rackspace Email, SharePoint, Exchange, Zimbra (and hundreds more). 

Welcome to the fray iCloud. Only your email has musical accompaniment.

Punch 1) Microsoft accuses Google of lying about Apps for government. This can be seen as Microsoft's revenge for the Google Apps suit last year, where it sued the Department of Interior for allegedly giving Microsoft an unfair advantage in its bidding process. Google went on to win an injuction in that suit. One of Google's points was that Microsoft's solution lacked FISMA, the security certification required the government for government contracts. Waiting for a chance to bite back, earlier this month, Microsoft accused Google of lying about having FISMA for its Google Apps for Government. 

Counter Punch. Google responded by saying that since it has FISMA for Google Apps for Business, and Google Apps for Government is basically Google Apps for Business with additional security, FISMA applies here as well.  

Flurry of Punches 2) Microsoft has followed up with a flurry of punches in an attempt to knock out Google Apps. A few days ago Microsoft posted a blog entry where it rather cleverly compared Google Apps costs to an iceberg with most of the costs being hidden, or what it called a "Google tax". The blog entry was followed by a whitepaper elaborating upon what the hidden costs were.  Not stopping at that, Microsoft also released a website with a live example of how Google Docs spoils document fidelity as compared to Office Web Apps. Quite ironically, the Office Web Apps example doesnt open for the Bee at all…

Counter Punch. Google has kept mum so far at the latest Microsoft agression.

This comes a long way from Microsoft's earlier strategy in the business market where it simply kept silent about Google's creeping success, and would refuse to aknowledge its existence. Those days are gone. The fight is out in the open, and nasty. 

Since public memory is short, the Google Bee felt it was a good time to dig up the archives, and research Gmail's track record. Because from what the Bee remembers, this isnt exactly the first time. Here is what the Bee discovered after his sojourn in the time machine.

August 7, 2008 – An undetermined no. of Gmail users locked out for 15 hours.

August 11 2008 – Gmail goes down for 2 hours. 

August 15 2008 – Gmail goes down "unofficially"

October 17, 2008 – Gmail goes down almost for a day.

February 29, 2008 – Gmail goes down for 4 hours.

September 1, 2009 – Gmail goes down for half an hour.

Nov 15, 2010 – Gmail goes down for around 10 minutes

February 28, 2011 – Gmail deletes data of .02% users for 4 days, recovers.

Not a very flattering track record huh? Gotta straighten your back Google, especially if you want to win over the business market.