Raju Gulabani, a Google Director of Product Management, says the ideal customer for the new Google Apps Connector for BES is the mid- to large-size company that already employs BES for Exchange v4.16, but would like to reduce its cost-per-user. Businesses that switch from an average BES for Exchange deployment to Google mail and the Google Apps Connector for BES could reduce their existing BES costs-per-user by as much as 70 percent, according to Gulabani.

However, companies with BES for Lotus Domino or Novell Groupwise--or older versions of BES for Exchange--need to upgrade to BES for Exchange v4.16 to employ the Google Apps Connector, Gulabani says. Support for , is expected in the future.

Unfortunately, the calendar sync function is only "one way," so users will automatically see new appointments or meetings added via a desktop computer, but entries made on the BlackBerry will not "reverse sync" with the full Web version of Google Calendar. However, the company is working on adding this functionality and it should be available some time during the second half of 2009, according to Gulabani.

I also noticed that it takes longer than I'd like for new contacts added to my Gmail address book online to make it over to my BlackBerry. Contact sync took as long as 30 minutes in some cases.

Google announced an enterprise-centric version of its Google Mobile App, as well, which is meant to make it simple for BlackBerry administrators to deploy the app suite to large groups of users. BES installation packages are available immediately at mobile.google.com/enterprise.