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With the April 2006 release of Google Calendar, the Mountain View, Calfornia based company made their intentions to create an online suite of office applications more clear.
Google Calendar is the most recent release of online applications that include GMail, Google Talk, and Google Page Creator. Calendar allows users to keep schedules, plan events, and synchronize with others. With the ability to keep and share multiple calendars, the application facilitates overlaying multiple schedules.
The business implications of remote, synchronized calendaring are significant. The most popular competing solution is Microsoft's Outlook, which requires a Microsoft Exchange server to enable calendar sharing. Outlook also runs as a desktop application not available on all machines, and requires licensing fees for each installed copy. In contrast, Google calendar requires no hardware or software, and is accessible from any internet connection.
With GMail, Google proved that a browser-based email client could be gracefully executed. Earlier this year, Google Talk, an instant messaging client, was integrated into GMail. Google Talk is a minor player in the world of instant messaging clients, however, it supports industry standard open protocols allowing connection to the users of many other chat clients.
In March 2006 Google purchased Silicon Valley company Upstartle, creators of Writely, an online word processor. Writely allows standard word processing features as well as collaborative document editing. The features of Writely mesh with the other Google online applications. When Writely is released, Google will have built a browser-based suite of applications for mail, calendaring, webpage creation, and word processing. These applications offer an alternative to Microsoft Office's Outlook, Frontpage, and Word.
Microsoft has previously announced that the next generation of Office applications will feature a technology called Live, allowing sharing and collaboration. However, Office will remain software based and require licensing fees.
Google is likely to offer versions of their online applications for corporate use, without the current advertising scheme. Commercial versions might also support domain and website management features, allowing a single point of interaction for website, mail, calendar, and document hosting.
