I have been using Google Apps for about six years and have been totally satisfied with this cloud-based email and calendar system. The University of Michigan is now switching most of its work force to the same product. Here's an excerpt from a recent article that indicates that Roche is also going in the same direction for its 90,000 workers on a global basis (see: Roche getting entire workforce to use Google Apps). Below is an excerpt from the article:
Swiss drug giant Roche...has generated buzz in the tech press for deciding to adopt Google Apps for its more than 90,000 workers, using the cloud-based software as a way to connect its global workforce without the IT headaches of managing email and calendar software in its own data centers. Roche CIO and financial chief Alan Hippe wrote last week that the company went through a couple of email and calendaring platforms over the past two and a half years that stymied collaboration....Roche, the world's largest maker of cancer drugs, and other large biopharma companies have looked at cloud-based software systems as a way to reduce the strain on their IT support groups, as such applications have been known to require significantly less internal management than local software that lives in the companies' own data centers. Eli Lilly, ..., for instance, tapped Amazon's cloud platform several years ago over expanding its own IT infrastructure. For Roche's part, the company decided to use Google Apps after a review of cloud-based systems. With workers in 140 countries, Hippe wrote, the company expects that the social aspects of Google's...apps will help bring those workers closer together amid efforts to develop products for patients. Employees will also be able to access the Google software with any web-connected device.
This all makes perfect sense to me, particularly for a global company that operates in 140 countries and is seeking to reduce its IT costs as well as make document sharing easier. At first, I was a little confused about CIO Alan Hippe's reference to the "social aspects of Google apps" and then I realized that he must be referring to Google's SMS and interactive chat features. For me, email has always been a much less formal and more efficient means of communication than snail mail. However and for younger generations, email to far too formal -- they much prefer texting for most interactions. I can see why a company such as Roche would prefer an integrated and standardized communication cloud-based system combined with word processing and spreadsheet applications.
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