Google frees up your IT

Talk about "cloudware". Google's latest offer to businesses and higher education is to take care of their email, chat, calendar, and other office applications. At University of Iowa, for example, the University has decided to get a license to use Microsoft Outlook Software. Server space for our emails (to the best of my knowledge) remains physically on University of Iowa servers, not at Microsoft. In this latest Google "freebie," the email for your organization is the one and only Gmail, with all its surveillance capabilities.

Here is the offer (Basic/Free is on the left side and Premium/$$$$ is on the right):

Applications
Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page
- 99.9% uptime guarantee for email**
- Email storage		5.552502 GB / account		25 GB / account
- Relevant text-based ads alongside email		Standard		Optional
- Conference room and resource scheduling

This is a major turn in the redeployment of the server-client model. Sometimes I wonder if I am making a big deal out of nothing. After all, I have a few domains with emails attached to them. The emails physically reside on the domain hosting service's servers. I also use Yahoo! for personal email applications, but in light of our recent conversations about intellectual property rights and enclosure, I am just a little freaked by the concept that Arizona State University adopted Gmail as their new e-mail platform. Proctor and Gamble signed on as well.

I would hope that a major public university like ASU would have bargained to make sure that their professors' and students' emails remain their intellectual property.

To check out more you can visit this page - Google Apps

p.s. I can tell from the marketing video that Google has adapted the free "OS" platform for the way the home page works for one's organization with Google Apps. Clicking and dragging content around is an innovation provided through work done by open source peeps. For more about this stuff do a search for Joomla or Word Press.