After my quick hands-on review of Google Apps for Your Domain, I had a chance to interview Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products for Google.

Rafe Needleman: What's the vision for Google's small-business products?

Matt Glotzbach: We're bringing the ease of use of consumer apps to a business setting, eliminating the cost of buying, installing, and maintaining servers. Our goal is to develop an application suite that leverages our infrastructure, that will serve as a platform to give businesses a significantly lower cost (or free) solution, and will also be a platform for the future.

This product is targeted for the small and medium business segment. We're getting traction in education. And there's been a lot of interest in larger enterprises.

RN: What about other applications, such as Writely and Spreadsheets?

MG: We see Google Apps for Your Domain as a platform that allows us to add new capabilities and whole new products, and roll them into the offering. We have nothing formal to announce at this time, but we are definitely looking at other products we can roll into the suite, and candidates are Writely and Spreadsheets.

We've also had requests for blogging and Google Groups, and for other technologies that haven't yet been released.

One of the benefits of the software as a service model is that we can deploy new capabilities quickly and at no cost to the customer.

RN: When will we see these new capabilities?

MG: There's no specific date yet, unfortunately. There will be a paid, premium version this year. At that time we may have additional capabilities.

RN: Paid services? Tell me more.

MG: The premium version will focus more on the needs of the medium and large business, focusing on support and service level agreement, and some additional services. We don't have specifics to announce at this time, but we're looking at things like APIs, single sign-on, and other prerequisites for an enterprise to adopt this technology.

RN: How will Google support the small business?

MG: The free version has support commensurate to our consumer products. You can submit requests and bugs to a queue, where a team of professionals will respond, but there is no guarantee of reply time. There's also a fairly massive support group that we participate in, in Google Groups.

RN: What about security and privacy?

MG: Obviously, end-user privacy and security are paramount to Google. We're not new to the hosted e-mail game; we have tens of millions of users who trust us with their e-mail.

But by no means do we feel this solution is for everyone. There are a set of organizations for whom this doesn't make sense at the time, especially regulated industries like health care and financial services. There are internal solutions [Google server appliances], and we are exploring those types of options.

RN: Do you plan to offer domain registration services?

MG: Not at this time. It's not our business. There are plenty of folks who do a great job at it. I will say that we're striving to make it easier to set up and configure, though.

RN: Compare Google's small-business philosophy to Microsoft's.

MG: In some ways I think it's very similar. [With Office Live,] Microsoft seems to be targeting more of the consumer or the individual, although they have some offerings for the small business. What we're trying to do is bring the consumer ease of use and user experience of Google E-mail and Calendar to the small business.

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Google Apps for Your Domain is a good start, but more is needed.
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It's easy to adminster Gmail users on your domain.
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Yesterday, Google released Google Apps for Your Domain, a suite of free hosted services for small businesses, at www.google.com/a. At the moment, the suite--it really should be called Google Office--is a bundle of existing Google products, loosely integrated by how you manage them for your business and the fact that they share a domain. Your domain.

For example, I set up a fictitious company, DemoArigato. Google's suite offers this firm small-business versions of the communications apps Gmail, Chat, and Calendar. The suite gives everybody in the company a branded version of the applications. So now if you send e-mail to rafe@demoarigato.com, I'll get it. (This is not exactly new; in February the company released Gmail for Your Domain.) The suite makes it easy to manage user accounts, and you can even replace the Gmail and Calendar logos with your own.

The suite also includes Page Creator. This is Google's tool for creating and managing a simple company Web site, now actually at the domain of your choice. (As of this writing, the domain site www.demoarigato.com isn't calling up the Google page I created using the product; it can take up to two days for domain maps to update across the Internet.)

Setting up Google Office was actually harder than installing software, since it required logging on to my domain registrar (where I parked the demoarigato domain) and changing settings so that the Google services would appear to run on demoarigato.com. Not only will Google not do this for you, the instructions were not perfectly aligned with my registrar's Web interface, so I was left wondering if I had in fact set everything up correctly (since the Web page isn't live yet, I'm still not sure). It would be much easier if Google offered domain registration itself; then, presumably, the settings could be made automatically.

Also, as a hosted business suite, Google is missing a few big elements. There's no word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation program, although Google does have both a word processor (Writely) and a spreadsheet app in beta.

The productivity apps will be integrated into this suite later, it's been reported, but it's not clear how they'll work as part of an office suite. Writely and Spreadsheets have different interfaces and store their files separately, so not only do they not work well together, but we've yet to see how file management will be handled in a group setting.

There are also no native offline applications for the suite. This is fine if all your employees work full-time in front of connected computers, but not so hot when they're on planes or if they want to use mobile devices to send mail or access their calendars. (See Calgoo for a solution.)

Then there's security. In the wake of the AOL search-data flap, do you want all your company's communications stored on Google servers?

The suite of applications in this 1.0 version of Google's first official small-business suite is unimpressive when you compare it to the capabilities of a business-focused workgroup application such as Joyent, a productivity suite such as Zoho's, and especially the capabilities of the full line of applications and services from Microsoft. But it is a heck of a deal for a small business, and the applications are easy to use once you get the servers configured. Today, it's a useful suite for simple and undemanding small businesses.

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Joyent's clean interface for e-mail, calendar, people, and files
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You can reply to e-mail messages as though they were blog posts
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A few days ago I got a demo of Joyent from the company's CTO, Jason Hoffman. His Web service is an e-mail application, calendar, contact list, and file storage for small groups. It's similar enough to Outlook and to existing online e-mail applications that it's easy to grok, but it also has tweaks on the standard model that could make a difference for business customers.

It starts with Joyent's security defaults. The default privacy setting for everybody's e-mailbox is "wide open." Anybody in the team can peek into anybody else's mailbox. It's what Hoffman calls "cubicle security": you trust your coworkers not to snoop on your desk, but if they need to do so they can, and they could save your bacon and the company's if you're on vacation and somebody needs that one piece of data that's on your desk. Users can lock their e-mailboxes easily enough (Hoffman's own e-mailbox is locked from his employees) and also set access by person or by item.

The security defaults are whacked, if you ask me, but Joyent gets a big thumbs-up for its clever handling of e-mail reply threads. On a group message, instead of replying to all and participating in an unruly thread of messages, you can reply via a comment field at the bottom of the message and send a pointer to the original message--now with a managed discussion thread appended to it--back to the recipient or to the group of people who are CC:'d on it. This is much cleaner than the standard way we handle e-mail discussions.

Also clever: All items in Joyent--messages, appointments, contacts, and files--can be given tags, and users can subscribe to these tags on their Joyent desktop. This amounts to an extremely quick way to create project workspaces made up of e-mail threads, files, and appointments.

The two big downsides of Joyent are that there's no offline version of it yet (although the Joyent server is standards compliant; the e-mail can be accessed by IMAP clients, for example) and that its cool tools don't easily extend to people outside your company's installation. Also, in my testing, the application was a bit slow.

For a small company or a start-up looking for a hosted e-mail system, especially a company that doesn't want to buy in to the whole Microsoft Office/Exchange ecosystem, Joyent is worth serious consideration. It costs $15 to $100 a month, depending on the number of users.

For a deep and in-person look at Web 2.0 applications in the office, come to the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on October 11 and 12. CNET is a sponsor, and I'll be speaking at the event.

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HitTail shows you which search words are underperforming
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The service recommends you write about particular topics
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If you want to know what the top search terms are that land people on your site or blog, you want Web analytics software. There are some good and comprehensive tools out there, such as VisiStat. But there's another valuable way to use search engine results: the new HitTail service.

The service attempts to divine what your site's visitors are "trying to tell you with the language of search." It looks at the search terms that got visitors to your site but still show up low on search engine results lists. HitTail posits that if you write more about these terms, you'll get more traffic from search engines.

This is a very clever idea, and during the free beta period, it's worth trying out if you write a blog or run a commerce Web site that has a blog attached to it. Be warned that there is a lot of cultish prose on the site about the Long Tail effect and the certain riches that will come your way if you use the service. Try to look past the hype and focus on the interesting and valuable information that HitTail offers.

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