When it comes to team collaboration, Pluggd.in team has tried out different services – right from task management services to Yammer, and given the nature of our team (some of the members are part-time involved), none of the solutions lived up to our expectations.
And for the services we tried, we realized that there was a need to be ‘logged on’ to 1-more-service and hence, the team lost interest in pretty much all of these services (we are back to emailing).
Now that Google+ is available for Apps users, let me tell you that Google+ is actually turning into a relevant product (sorry, we we have been on a bashing ride as far as G+ is concerned).
If you are an apps user, you are pretty much logged in to Google network all the time to use services like GTalk, Gmail and Google Docs. Adding G+ to these services simply bring the collaboration part as an extension to what one is already using (without the need to use any other third-party product).
Why is Google+ for Enterprise Interesting?
Because Facebook cannot do this. But then, can’t you create a group in Facebook, make it private only and viola, you are done! Technically yes – but Facebook brings several other noise (like updates from friends etc) that brings down one’s productivity (debatable, eh?).
In fact, Facebook started with the enterprise use case that Google+ is now offering (just that enterprise in Facebook’s case was college and users were the not-so-serious college kids). Google+ however has taken an inspiration from Facebook and has signed up few colleges too to use plus.
Google Apps users will have access to the same set of features that are available to every Google+ user, and more. In addition to sharing publicly or with your circles, you’ll also have the option to share with everyone in your organization, even if you haven’t added all of those people to a circle.
That is, create circles of your team members and collaborate – it’s as simple as that. Who is Google competing against? Well, a lot of Enterprise collaboration companies who are selling twitter-like collaboration (within teams) to big organizations. The key however is whether Google+ will open up APIs for integration with existing HRMS/CRM systems or not.
Unless it does so, it will remain a nice-to-have feature and maybe, the initial enthusiasm will fade away over a period of time.
What do you think is “your” use-case of Google Plus?
