Google Apps in your learning world
At the end of August, Google released "Google Apps for Your Domain," or GAFYD. It’s a rather unwieldy name for a product with a lot of promise. I’ve waited until now for it to evolve some more, but it is still truly in beta. Heck, sometimes I’m not quite sure it’s ready for beta. Regardless, it’s still got a lot of promise.
At first it seems unimpressive. It’s a suite of products with which we’re already familiar, including GMail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and a personalized start page. It also includes Google Page Creator, which is a WYSIWYG web page creator.
The great part of all this is the domain name. GAFYD is the familiar suite of products, customized to your domain. For instance, I also own the wine-girl.net domain. I now have email at that domain, accessed via Gmail (e.g., xxx@wine-girl.net). The GMail is personalized with my wine-girl.net logo. There is a personalized start page, displaying the wine-girl.net logo and pre-defined topics and news feeds. You can create 50 email addresses and users, and share contacts across all of your users. It’s all free, for now at least. It’s all personalized.
Google needs to market this product heavily to small businesses. Why? Imagine the possibilities for learning and knowledge distribution. Everyday your users log into their email, which they reach via their personalized home page. The personalized home page is pre-loaded with the latest news from inside the company and relevant outside news. All of your users’ contacts are shared. The Web page creation tool means that each of your users can create their own content, sharing their knowledge via RSS feeds published to the home page. There is so much potential as to what this can do; so much informal learning at your fingertips.
What’s next for Google Apps? It seems inevitable that Google should roll in their office-style apps, such as Writely, Spreadsheets, and SketchUp. However, GAFYD is not, at least in its current incarnation, a competitor for Office and/or OpenOffice. It’s more of a content management system or collaborative tool. I would think that Google would add access to Blogger, which it now owns. I also would think Google would be hard at work at integrating the Google AdWords marketing feature into GAFYD. Assuming that these various Google tools all converge into GAFYD, and remain a free tool, there is no reason that small businesses shouldn’t adopt the suite. The only thing you need to buy is a domain name.
Technorati Tags: Google Apps, GAFYD, Google, Web 2.0, informal learning
