Google Moves Google Apps Out of Beta

Published on: July 7th, 2009 @ 1:52 PM UTC by William Johnson  | 

googlelogo Google announced today on its company blog that starting today, the company is ready to remove the “beta” label from it’s online services.

 

The company launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago and today, the company strips the ‘”beta” tag from Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Google Talk – their rendition of an Instant Messaging client like Windows Live Messenger, AIM – after a prolonged testing period to ensure the applications meet a high quality bar.

 

With the removal the “beta” tag, this will remove any doubt that Apps is ready for primetime, and is a mature product suite.

 

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise said in a blog posting. “Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small "beta" beneath the logo.”

 

In addition to moving the Google Apps out of beta, the  company said it has added some features to it’s Google Apps suite.

“We’re also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we’re adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.” Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps said in a separate blog posting. “To complement these new features, enterprise IT managers can access tools for switching to Google Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers”