Telegraph Media Group introduces Google Apps to replace Microsoft Office and Exchange

Euan Semple gave a link today to news from CIO that the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) have chosen to phase out Microsoft Office and Exchange in favour of Google Apps,  for staff to use for their word processing, e-mail and for collaboration.

The size (1,400 users) and visibility of TMG makes this a valuable coup for Google as they attempt to move into the corporate space.

Organisations change software suppliers all the time, but this change is significant because the move to Google Apps means that TMG's information will be hosted on servers provided and maintained by Google rather than on servers maintained by TMG itself.

TMG's Chief Information Officer, Paul Cheesebrough gives the following reasons for the change:

• He wants the IT department to take one a more strategic role and was concerned that the most frequent message users receive from IT is 'you are over your e-mail limit' (One of the disadvantages of owning and maintaining your own servers is that you have to police e-mail capacity once server space gets tight).
• TMG are not convinced by Microsoft Vista, and did not want to pay to upgrade from XP to Vista
• TMG ran a trial of Google Apps with 10% of their userbase, running alongside Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange.  The trial was popular and users did not want to turn Google Apps off.

Microsoft's Office and Outlook products are vulnerable to Google Apps because word processing and e-mail provision have been commoditised and can be provided by anyone.  Open source clones of Microsoft Word and Excel exist and are free to download and use.  Two recent international standards on document formats (OpenDocument and OpenOfficeXML) mean that documents produced in Word can be read in their open source counterparts and vica versa.  This commoditisation means that Microsoft can derive little  competitive advantage from Word, Excel and Outlook.

The real battle front for Microsoft is around SharePoint: at the moment the SharePoint product is a richer collaboration suite than Google apps, and a richer development environment for organisations to build applications, workflows and databases in.  Microsoft Office and Outlook could yet be saved by their tighter and tighter integration into SharePoint.

James Lappin