Richard Koman, newsfactor
Fast on the heels of Monday's launch of Googleapplication programming interfaces) or Google Gadgets.
"The Marketplace's initial focus is connecting customers of our communications and collaboration products, like Google Apps and Enterprise search, with third parties that sell complementary products and services," wrote Scott McMullan, Google Apps partner lead, on an official blog. "But that's just a start. We expect to grow to fit the needs of an expanding set of Google customers and developers."
Salesforce Integration?
Google Apps will be "tightly integrated" into Salesforce's service, TechCrunch said. Such a deal would further a working relationship the companies already have, in which Salesforce customers can manage their AdWords accounts. The deal makes sense, according to TechCrunch writer Erick Schonfeld. "Salesforce wants to get as close to Google as it can. And Google wants to sell its apps to enterprise customers (Salesforce has 41,000 of them)."
Both the Salesforce deal and the Gadgets programming model suggest that Google could make strong gains into enterprise, according to Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. "Over time, Gadgets and other technologies could provide avenues for enterprise-focused applications," he said. "At the same time, deals like Salesforce should create avenues for commercial distribution of new Google-enabled apps and services."
Extending Docs and Apps
At Google's developer conference, Google I/O, scheduled for May in San Francisco, Google programmers will be educating developers on how to extend Google Apps using the various data APIs the company has released. The data APIs provide an interface for reading and writing data to Google applications like Docs and Calendar. For instance, Google released a visualization API for Docs, which allows programmers to create widgets that represent spreadsheet data in various visual ways.
While most of the efforts so far are either simple or trivial, more complex interactions could make a compelling business case. The spreadsheet feature of Google Docs could serve as a front-end for viewing data pulled from different data sources inside an organization, for example. And a simple programming interface would make it easy for in-house developers to provide new, custom views of data trends not originally envisioned.
Yet another development focused on business is Google Gears, software that allows users to work with Google Docs offline. Until recently, Google Docs was an online-only application, which effectively kept users tethered to Microsoft Office. With the option of using Google's simple word processing and spreadsheet features online or offline, users who don't need advanced features can feel more confident in adopting Google's free option.
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