Google Apps Gets New Group Collaboration Features

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Dec 9, 2009 Comments

1 comment

By now, it's pretty obvious that Google is making a major play for the enterprise market. With the addition of Google Groups to the Google Apps suite, another key piece of the collaboration pie is complete.

New Ways to Collaborate and Be Productive

We've seen enough new capabilities added to both Google Apps and Google Sites to demonstrate Google's desire to be the go-to productivity service for organizations today.

Today, a new, but old, capability has been added to Google Apps Premier and Education Editions: Google Groups.

You are probably part of a Google Group today, there's one in the public domain for just about any topic you could dream of. Now, Google Groups become a key collaboration tool for business's leveraging Google Apps.

Business users can easily create a Google Group without the assistance of an IT Administrator. Administrator's simply enable add "user-managed groups in the administration control panel and users can go about the business of creating and managing new groups.

These groups can be used as mailing lists, created for workgroups, project teams and just about another team-based function you can think of. Users can share documents, presentations, sites with groups reducing the need to manage individual user permissions.

You can get your group notifications via email, or by the Groups forum view. And you have the ability to search group archives.

Administrators can still manage how Groups are created and maintained. But putting the day to day administration in the hands of the user is a smart thing to do.

Have a look at how it works:

Google Wave Can Use Groups Too

Not only can Google Apps take advantage of the Group capability, but so can Google Wave. If you are one of the many who are trying out Google's communication/collaboration service, you can now add a Group to your Wave.

This is an important first step in creating Waves that are private and have edit/view permissions. You can set the permission that only the group has access to the Wave content, or you can keep the Wave public. It looks like you can also secure editing access to just a group, even if you have the Wave Public. Something interesting to consider.