The Official Google Blog now proclaims: Google Apps is out of beta (yes, really). And Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise more or les spells out that the decision has been taken for marketing reasons. The beta label sends out the message that software is "not ready for prime time," and Google is keen to sell Google Apps to business users.
In a separate post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Paving the road to Apps adoption in large enterprises, Google Apps' senior product manager Rajen Sheth says: "We're taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk to remove any doubt that Apps is a mature product suite." Google is, after all, pitching this stuff against Microsoft Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious change in the software or the terms of service, and Gmail has actually been flakier over the past year, in my experience, than it was two or three years ago. However, Sheth points to: "live replication of data to other locations for near-instant disaster recovery, and special handling of business users' data in our data center operations." He also says:
And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we're adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.
Presumably Google now feels it can better enable enterprises to meet the accountability requirements of US regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Glotzbach adds that "for those who still like the look of 'beta', we've made it easy to re-enable the beta label for Gmail from the Labs tab under Settings". There's no indication of how many people really are that sad.
