Google's New Wave

Google's Mission – Collaboration


Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. In other words, their specialty is collaboration. Recently there were two projects that I was working on that required me to research two of Google's product offerings, the collaboration tools for Small Businesses and their latest Google Wave product.

Several months ago I started a business with which required that document sharing along with other collaboration tools with both my internal customers (my salespeople and management) along with my external customers (clients). As a project manager I conducted the comparison between Google’s and Microsoft’s Collaboration offering for Small Businesses .The tests included both my personal use and evaluation along with online research for outside developer’s reviews of each offering. Although Microsoft’s application was based on the very popular Sharepoint application used by many larger organizations the Google application was, in my opinion far superior for a number of reasons. First and foremost they keep their mission in mind their focus which is collaboration is where their expertise lies.

1.The product offerings were more robust with features that allowed document sharing, the creation of a company intranet and many many more.

2.Ease of logging in to the application. The interface is direct. A gmail account is required and access is given by the administration

3.Completely free for the small business applications but scalable by virtue of a premium subscriptions to grow with you into what hopefully can be your huge enterprise.

A new Google application that takes personal and business collaboration to a new level was announced last year in April and they are still working on it. The group that created Google Maps announced the pre-release of Google Wave. This application is the ultimate application for personal and business collaboration; bringing email, instant messaging, video and other media into a real-time application written in HTML 5, and the whole application runs in a browser. The hour and a half video that demonstrates this application show and application that is simply awesome. See video at http://wave.google.com/about.html. Unlike some of their other applications they released this early, incomplete application to select developers so that by the time this completed project/application is released to the public there will be additional applications, plugin's etc. written for the app. The Google site http://wave.google.com/using-wave.html mentions a couple of ways that the application can be used (organizing events, running group projects, sharing meeting notes, brainstorming, interactive games) but there will be many more because the app appears to be so much fun to use. T

To summarize, the Google applications are clean, well thought out, and robust. Another very key aspect of Google's approach to application development is that, “As with Android, Google Chrome, and many other Google efforts, we plan to make the code open source as a way to encourage the developer community to get involved.” I have requested an invitation to be able to use the Google Wave application in its' beta stages because it just looks so exciting. I can't wait to use it.

References:

http://www.google.com/corporate/index.html

Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave, Retrieved February 25th 2010 from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html

http://wave.google.com/about.html

http://wave.google.com/using-wave.html