Google announced a few great updates to Google Apps suite this week, which means those of us using Google Apps (like ReadyMadeWeb) are getting free upgrades at no additional cost (we pay nothing to use Google Apps) and without any additional setup—this is the beauty of web-based software.
So what are the new changes? These aren’t major fixes, but among the updates are two very small issues that had been an annoyance in Google Apps.
First, Google addressed the paranoia of many users who haven’t liked the conspicuous lack of a save button on many documents. The auto-save function built into Google Docs is supposed to free us from worrying about hitting the save button every few minutes, a worry forged through years of using buggy and crash-prone software like many of the early versions of Microsoft Word or MS Works. So, just to be nice and prove that they’re listening to our paranoid need for a button, the folks at Google have added one. Now users can click the button manually between Google’s frequent auto-saves, to satisfy their compulsion.
Google also added a core functionality that really needed to be part of Apps from day one—a clipboard. This clipboard will allow copy/paste functionality to work entirely within Google Docs, rather than using your computer’s built-in copy/paste functionality. This might seem redundant until you consider the problem of preserving format consistency when using a Mac or PC’s built-in clipboard. Copying document data from a web-based application, to a desktop clipboard, and back into a web-based app can cause some serious formatting shenanigans. Columns don’t stay aligned, highlights and fonts aren’t preserved, and the code behind the data becomes a garbled mess. The new built-in clipboard solves these issues by keeping everything within Docs.
Despite these seemingly basic features having just come online, Google reports that even more companies and universities are flocking to its online offering:
With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they’ll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.
The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University, Yale University, Davenport University and the College of William and Mary are just a handful of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.
Large corporations and Universities can afford the best that money can buy, yet they’re realizing that buying boxes of software that must be installed on thousands of machines and then updated and re-updated no longer makes sense, especially when web-based alternatives like Google Docs are also more secure and allow users to access their documents anywhere on any computer with a Internet connection.
To read more about the most recent updates to Google Apps, check out the entry on the official Google Blog.
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