The SpiderGroup Blog

For the last 10 years I’ve been working in the technology sector; I qualified as a systems engineer, I dabbled with software development, I tried my hand at sales and I ended up running operations for a successful internet services company but the thing that has fascinated me the most throughout my time in the industry is something we all know as ‘Project Management’. Now before you judge me let me assure you that I do know how utterly dreary that comes across, the term itself makes you want to yawn and ‘Project Manager’ doesn’t exactly inspire the imagination when it comes to choosing a career, but this is where I think we all get it wrong…

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You might be thinking what is SharePoint? It is a company intranet technology, written and expandable using Microsoft .Net; in layman’s terms it is a place to store company information in the form of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, all standard document formats, providing simple ways to share information, manage version control, blogs, wiki’s and a whole lot more.

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Google Aps is simply not an enterprise level suite of applications yet. (It may well get there but isnt even close yet)

Firstly it is still in Beta testing mode – this means you have no service level agreement with Google. They can take the whole system down without warning, meaning guess what…..none of your staff can work! They also state in the terms and conditions when you signup that they cannot guarantee the safety of your data and are free to use your data for marketing purposes if they please. Brilliant!

Once you are in, you’re locked in - People for years have complained that they are locked into Microsoft’s software stack. Well if you start using Google Apps you’re now in a similar situation! Any smart company should put in place a plan for the future. What if you come to realise you didn’t want to host your application on the Google App Engine anymore? Good luck, almost everything you are given access to is proprietary — that means all your data is locked into a format that isn’t like a traditional relational database. This could turn into a disaster for your business if you rely on a custom built app. (more…)