Google Apps: With Outlook sync, feel free to dump Exchange

Google today announced a feature that allows Google Apps customers to sync their mail, calendar and contacts directly into Outlook, allowing the users to keep what they love most about Outlook without being tied to the costs of running an Exchange server. (Techmeme)

For companies, the move helps tear down barriers toward an adoption of Google Apps, a cloud-based service that the company has been pitching as an easy-to-use, less expensive alternative approach toward corporate mail.

Indeed, the company recently has made progress on that front by expanding the service to meet the needs of business customers with things like Blackberry interoperability and offline access to Gmail. With the Outlook synchronization, users have the option of using the Web-based interface (which looks a lot like Gmail) or the desktop side Outlook program.

This is one of those announcements that can go a long way at convincing companies that are still on the fence about a switch to go ahead and jump over to the Google side. Changing habits on the end-user side is never easy. No one else knows that more than the IT folks. Allowing a company to make the back-end change from Exchange to Apps without having to re-train employees on how to use a new interface is huge - at least for the sanity of the IT folks.

And over time, as users become more comfortable with the Web-based version of Google Apps mail, it becomes less of an issue if companies decide against licensing the latest version of Outlook. After all, in the end, that's what this is all about. Google is trying to use email and calendar to get itself in the enterprise door. It's other apps - spreadsheets, docs and so on - aren't ready for prime time yet, so companies aren't looking to dump Microsoft Office -  yet.

In a webcast last week, Google Enterprise president Dave Girouard acknowledged that other parts of the Google suite “have a ways to go” and that its suite isn't a replacement for Office.

“We understand and appreciate that we have more work to do,” he said.