Google Apps: How We Locked Down Documents

06.04.2011
Although Google Apps has made progress over the past few years as a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite for businesses, the first big wave of adopters have been government agencies, schools and nonprofit organizations.

Google certainly has enterprise Google Apps customers such as Virgin America Airlines and Genentech, but it only owns a tiny percentage of the enterprise e-mail market. The bulk of Google Apps migrations have come from the public sector -- setting off a fight for cash-strapped state government agencies , with its BPOS (business productivity online suite) cloud service.

With tighter budgets than most corporations, government agencies have been more apt to move to cloud-based services that allow e-mail and documents to be stored in remote data centers.

But with all these documents being saved and shared in Google's cloud service, two Google Apps users who spoke to CIO.com -- the City of Panama City, Florida and the nonprofit American Lung Association of New England -- were both surprised that Google did not provide better tools for actually monitoring the documents.

Both organizations have moved from old and discordant technologies to a cheaper, more modern cloud alternative in Google Apps for e-mail, collaboration and productivity apps.