Unholy alliance
Search giant Google has kept its enterprise productivity offering - Google Apps - relatively low key until now. But a new plug-in designed to seduce businesses away from Microsoft Exchange Server as their communications back-end.
The clever bit is Google's acknowledgement that many people are just too used to the Outlook user interface to shift wholesale onto Gmail and its future derivatives. So it has created a plug-in called Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook that lets you use Outlook to connect to Google Apps instead of Exchange Server.
This is an intriguing new twist to the Google, Microsoft battle. Just as Microsoft makes its move on Google's home turf with a new search engine, Google ripostes with an attack at the productivity market currently dominated by Microsoft Office. Fun!
Here's a video clip from Google explaining how it all works:
