Google Apps- some brief observations

I was an early adopter of Google Apps, and have been offering feedback in forums on some major issues I have run across. I personally like using Google Apps, but have found that usage of it isn't any different than using Yahoo's Groupware or other products out there. In fact, Yahoo has some better features, though their kludgy interface makes those features nigh unusable. I suppose I could pay for Basecamp instead, but its just not worth it to me and my friends.

Its also not worth it for most small non-profits. I consult on the side (for free) to non-profits in the Sacramento region when they have weird tech questions they need answers, and sometimes I also implement some solutions for them. To be really blunt, I don't see the benefits in using Google Apps considering the ensuing chaos of presenting a new user interface just to share some documents. Google Apps is just too limited in some really important features- which almost puts it on par with having multiple Microsoft Office users sans a fully supported Sharepoint server.

Here are a few observations on why I can't justify rolling this product out to the several non-profits and church groups that I support:

1. Mailing lists implementation in Google Apps bites because it:
1. is limited to site admins- bad, bad, bad for the admins.
2. is unable to do bulk imports- worse than bad for admins.
3. doesn't pull from existing contact lists for auto-completion of entries. WTF?
   
4. Suggestion- get rid of the mailing list tool and add native Google Groups integration into Google Apps. That would be a deal sealer for a lot of small hobby groups and non-profits.
   
2. Features like autocompletion are specific only to each user, cannot be shared between different users or within contact group members, and are not enabled for things like, well, mailing lists.
3. If things are really all that integrated, how come I can't share contacts with other Google App users in my domain? Basically, this is the ONE thing that kills small orgs during growth, is multiple duplicate entries of contacts that aren't kept up synced. Google Apps doesn't address the issue, which will just exacerbate it later.
4. Same goes for contact groups. Can't be shared under Google Apps, so what is the point in having them? Example: "Hey, Brandy, its Bill. I need you to log in and get me all the contacts from Joe's Workgroup. Can't do it? Dammit, we just blew the contract!". That's what I mean.
   
5. Its not ADA compliant. No, really, its not. I have two blind veteran coders who can't use the site. This is simple to fix, Google has the resources, and there are plenty of blind users who would VOLUNTEER so long as somebody at Google would actually take the time to deal with them. Come on, find one of the five non-PhDs out of the gazillion PhDs at the Googleplex, and give someone at a local Society for the Blind chapter a phone call. Its not THAT hard.
   
6. Google Sites is a nice idea, but near useless when it comes to data archival. I can't back it up with RSS feeds. Worse yet, some of the features, like the templates for "issues", aka tickets, cannot be spooled off into a document. Neither can any of the other text. This is a migration and management nightmare waiting to happen. I can just imagine one of my less technical users coming to me saying "I don't know what happened to all of our Amnesty International letter writing data, it just disappeared". Ungh.
7. Google Sites idea of user and data security is a joke. It needs to be more fine grained (like per page, or per branch, not per site).
   
8. Google Docs is better, but I DON'T NEED Google Apps to make it any better for me. Yes, it can be a little easier if you have an internal group to choose from based on a domain, but Google Apps + Docs needs a little more than that to get people to log in an share that way. Again, no additional "domain specific" integration available that is any different, so what is the point?
9. The Google Apps Start page is a security nightmare. Get rid of it, or make sure it doesn't give out critical data when you go to it WITHOUT LOGGING IN. Basically, if I have something to put on there as the site admin going out to all of the users, it should not be visible to the entire world. Unfortunately, this options does not exist yet. I won't even go into what a malicious page widget might do.
   

After some tweaking around, I have come to the conclusion that Google Apps has some limited functionality, but is otherwise no different from, say, Yahoo Groups or other similarly branded software. The main reason I say this is because the apps from a few of Google's flagship products are there, but none of the group integration is present in any effective way. For other features, a lot of usability was just thrown in and then abandoned, with little thought as to the implications later on. Maybe it will be better in a couple of years, but without feedback from Google on what fixes might be addressed, and some obvious roadmaps for future development, I am not going to recommend it to most people who come to me for advice, but I would recommend it to almost anyone else.

So, who would it work best for? People who aren't at all technical, who aren't going to be impacted if parts of the system get destroyed by some users, and who have nothing to hide, and aren't that organized, and don't care about integration features. Remarkably, that is actually a lot of small businesses and student groups out there- but if you are a stickler for things being "right", watch where you go with this product.