I really don’t understand why companies don’t think Google has made their apps enterprise ready. I’ve been playing with the premium version of Google Apps the last few days and it shows all the important characteristics of enterprise software:

Innocent Looking Settings That Break Everything

Google has this in spades. My favorite is the fact that if you happen to disable a service such as e-mail, all the settings continue to apply, but disappear from the admin dashboard. The net result for me was that all the Google Apps suddenly failed to send any e-mail (but e-mail from every other source worked perfectly).

A Fully Integrated Service Where Nothing Works Together

Check! You’d think that the list of users in the domain would show through in applications like Chat or for sharing documents right? Nope, you have to manually type them in as if the domain users didn’t exist.

Overly Destructive User Management

Oh yes. Delete a user and all the documents they created disappear, regardless of how many other people happen to be sharing them at the time.

Ridiculous Limitations

Want to change the owner of a document? No problems, as long as they’re a member of the domain. Want to change the owner of a spreadsheet? Nope – can’t do that. Spreadsheets are special.

What’s Missing?

They managed to respond to a support case within 24 hours which is a major no-no for true enterprise software. It should take at least a week. To be fair, I made it very difficult by solving my own problem (the invisible settings I mentioned above) before they responded.

Hopefully now that Google has been enterprise ready they can start working towards actually making useful software for business…