Google Apps

It looks like the City of Los Angeles has decided to go with gmail and Google Apps. Check out the story at crn.com. That's 30000 users.

This is a huge coup because to pass this vote, they had to overcome the privacy concerns of the L.A.P.D. and other groups who prefer to have servers hosted on-site. (I suspect that they also used Postini for email compliance). Privacy and data security concerns for servers and data out in the "cloud" is probably the biggest barrier to adoption of cloud-based software services.

As more and more folks start reaping the benefits of using Google's services, traditional providers of expensive self-hosted enterprise applications will have to start cutting and gutting the cost structures of their products. This is good for consumers, great for software developers who can code for the new cloud platforms (such as Google Apps), and horrible for enterprise software sales people, and IT service providers who manage traditional self-hosted enterprise software.

The first question that folks ask about Google Apps is data security and privacy.

PRIVACY

1. It's your data, even if it's on Google's servers. You control who sees it.


2. Google folks don't read your data, except as needed for a support call, or if authorized by your system administrator to protect the Google infrastructure or if compelled by law enforcement. (This is exactly how enterprises run their IT systems too).


3. Your content is scanned and indexed by Google programs and not their people. This is to help you search your documents quickly, and to allow Google to place ads for some services such as Gmail. The index files are also private and not shared with others.


4. Data is stored at their data centers. Locations are not advertised, and there is no guarantee that a particular data center holds some particular data. If somebody wanted to steal your data from their servers, they would have to search a lot of servers.

SECURITY

1. The servers that store your data are not published, and therefore hard to find.


2. Data centers that contain the servers are physically very secure, and heavily firewalled


3. Their customized server operating system makes it hard to use standard hacking techniques. Standard security holes, open ports, etc are disabled or removed.


4. Your data is replicated over multiple servers, which makes recovery from server failures almost instantaneous.


5. Server access by IT people is auditable.


6. They have filters to detect viruses and phishing.

Read more about it at Google Aps for Administrators.

When you consider all this, compare it to your own corporate security and privacy measures, both for internal servers and outsourced servers. For example:

1. Can access to your files and data be traced and audited? (Remember, most security breaches are internal).


2. Are your servers in a highly secure facility, physically and logically (via firewalls etc)?


3. Is your data automatically replicated in case of server failure? If so, how long does it take to recover?


4. Does your server infrastructure have popular operating systems such as Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and Unix, with known standard security holes?


5. How hard is it to steal your servers? If stolen, how hard is it to extract your data?

You may find that when you ask and answer these questions, outsourcing some of your IS/IT to Google Apps makes sense independent of cost.

Check this blog at ZDNet for further thoughts on Google data security.

Assuming that you are OK with Google Apps' data security and privacy, how do the IT costs compare?

Assume the following cost factors for a 50-person shop:

Personal Computers - $120/year for PC including power, and $100/year for OS & Support. Either way, both shops need 50 of them.

Office Suite software (e.g. MS-Office) - Both shops need 50 copies, but $100/year/user is needed for the traditional office solution, but only $50/year/user is needed for Google Apps.

Servers - $500/year each including space, power, and cooling, software & OS licenses, and OS assurance/support. Sharepoint, LDAP, Email, and other typical services distributed over machines as needed. The traditional setup will need about 8 of them for 40 people. The Google Apps setup will probably need two of them because the biggest applications of disk and CPU are run on Google App servers, and the cost is covered by $50/user above.

Router/Firewall - $50/year each including space, power, cooling, The traditional setup probably needs 3 of them, because of extra capacity for the servers, while the Google Apps setup can get away with two of them.

IT person - $60000/year/person. They are responsible for:
- installation of hardware & software on clients and servers
- patching/upgrade of software on clients and servers
- assuring backups
- tech support & training
The traditional shop needs two IT people because of all the work needed for the servers, and clients beyond the OS. The Google Apps shop needs only one because there is no installation or upgrade for the office suite or the servers, email server. Also, the amount of work needed for backups is less because the documents are hosted at Google Apps.

Business DSL Line - $200/month. The traditional setup can use one of them. Google Apps might get away with one, but will probably need two because of the extra communication to Google's servers.

A quick analysis shows the comparison.

_____________Traditional___ Google Apps
==========================================
50 PCs_________50_ $12000_____ 50 _$12000
Office S/W_______50__ $5000____ 50 ___$2500
Servers_________8___ $4000_____ 2 ___$1000
Routers_________3____ $150_____ 2 ____$100
DSL Line________1___ $2400_____ 2 ___$4800
IT People_______ 2__$120000_____ 1__ $60000
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTALS:___________$143550 ________$81400

For a this 50-person shop, that represents about a 40% savings. If you factor in custom applications, the savings may go down to 30%. Either way, that is often enough money to pay for extra business development or other beneficial business uses.

One great way to learn how to program Google Apps is to study projects that have used the API. The following open source projects use Google Apps. Download and study the code.

Google Apps For Moodle This will integrate Google Apps services with Moodle. The Moodle administrators can manage gApps accounts within Moodle and all the Moodle users will be able to access gApps services within Moodle (i.e eMail via SSO, ect..)

gconnect Single Sign-On and provisioning for Google Apps.

Google Map .Net Control A custom server control wrapper for the Google Maps API. Developed for ASP.Net using C#, JavaScript, and XSL. The GMap control makes using Google Maps easy for .Net developers; allowing them to interact with Google Maps using standard .Net language

Mr. Saber Metrics A set of sabermetrics hacks that use the various Google APIs. For example, baseball statistics are spidered from the Web, stored in Google Spreadsheets, and analyzed or displayed in Google Widgets. Another hack updates a Google Calendar with game info.

GChart GChart is a PHP library for Google Chart API. The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. However, it isn't convenient to use. GChart makes it easier to insert Google Chart in PHP pages.

coocle - command line google client coocle is a command line utility for searching 'google'. It has features of searching a keyword, comparing number of results for two sets of keyword and getting spelling corrections from google.

Google Weather Parser Library for .NET This connects to Google's Weather API and can grab weather ranging from forecasts, to current weather information, to times of the updates.

Google Docs Printer GD Printer is a software printer, that prints documents directly to your Google Docs account. Simply, when document submitted for printing on GD Printer, it will appear in your Google Docs.

ruby-google A Google Web API library for the Ruby programming language.

goofs goofs is a userspace filesystem which aims to expose Google services such as picasa images, contacts, blogs, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.

Google Doc Tool A tool that will allow you to list, search, delete, and add items from your Google Docs account. It is written in Python and currently shell-only, with a GTK+ version on the way.

GCOi - Google Checkout Interface An interface for the complicated Google Checkout sample code, making basic integration of Google checkout simpler and easier to understand.

Google Apps and services like it will revolutionize IT/IS. That is because it will drastically lower costs over time for the IT/IS hardware, operating systems, software, and maintenance needed to serve a group of a fixed size. Check out a sample analysis on this Squidoo page.

It stands to reason then that CFOs and CIOs at large companies will see a great opportunity to slash costs and put those expensive redundant IT/IS folks out on the street. That is depressing. Is that the whole story?

There is another side of the story. There are lots of companies who could benefit greatly from the computerization of their business operations. They would love to move beyond a bunch of PCs clustering around a shared hard drive of an overloaded server. They cannot do that easily today because the costs cannot be justified in terms of business benefit. Different businesses are at different distances from that cost-benefit line.

With Google Apps lowering the cost of expanding IT services for small businesses, they will now be able to justify spending more on IT because the return on that (lower) investment will be much higher. These same businesses will probably not have any IT folks or Google Apps folks on staff. However, if they find one, they will take on their services.

Consider the case of telephone operators. When telephone calls were switched manually, it was horribly difficult for many small businesses to justify a phone. As soon as Strowger found a way to automate the switching of phone calls, the cost of a phone went down dramatically, and came within the the reach of smaller businesses. That enabled them to make their operations more efficient and profitable. Now, most businesses have phones. These businesses often needed multiple phones and a way to use them. Out-of-work operators were great candidates for this kind of job.

The same will happen with IT workers as outsourced IT/IS utilities such as Google Apps lower IT costs. Net result...more IT jobs.

One huge objection to Google Docs is that you have to be online to edit your documents. That is almost not true for the word processor. Google Docs allows you to edit already created documents offline.

If you want to test it, here is what to do:

1. Get a google login at Gmail


2. Login and enable Google Docs


3. Enable offline access to the documents. That will trigger the installation of Google Gears and a request to use your local gears installation to store your offline documents.


4. You'll get a desktop shortcut which you can use offline.


5. Create a document online, and then go offline.


6. Edit the document offline


7. Use another computer to login and check your offline document.


8. Go back online to synchronize the document


9. Recheck your online document with the other computer

Try it out. Once you realize that you have a viable free alternative to paid office suites with relevant offline access, you might not want to go back.

You may like gmail, google docs, or whatever, but at the end of the day, they are not under your administrative control because somebody else (Google) owns the domain name. How can you use Google Apps under your own domain name?

Go to Google Apps to sign up for a domain name. It will cost about $10 yankee dollars per year, and eNom or GoDaddy are the hosts. When you sign up, Google will automatically coordinate the DNS settings, etc so that your domain maps to Google's servers. You then instantly get email, web pages, chat, docs and all the pieces of standard Google applications. Log into your admin account, and create users with their own email under your domain. You will have to enable Docs for your users.

After that, you can use your email just like gmail. (Or you can use POP3/TLS or IMAP to synch with a mail program on your computer such as Outlook or Evolution).

Now all of your users have Google Apps under your domain. Easy!

On a side note, if you already have a web site at another place (e.g. www.foofoo.com at a particular server on the internet), you can transfer that name to Google Apps, and then go through the Administrator panel to the domain admin panel, and point www.foofoo.com back to the original server. That way, your web server stays put, but your mail and documents can be at Google Apps.

That' s right folks. rails-primer.appspot.com shows how to build a Rails Application and deploy it on Google App Engine.

Ola Bini has also put out a page on getting Ruby On Rails working on the Google App Engine.

There is also an example using jruby and rack to deploy a Rails application to Google App Engine.

Cool!