Join this group: Google Groups joins Google Apps

Blogs, wikis, social networks, YouTube and Twitter are changing how many of us connect with others. Yet within most businesses, especially large corporations, the software hasn't evolved much over the last decade. While traditional business technologies give companies the necessary security and controls, they do so at the expense of rapid innovation. Businesses shouldn't have to make this compromise.

This is one reason why customers are so enthusiastic about Google Apps. It offers enterprise-grade security and control while letting businesses instantly tap into a swift stream of innovation, based on services tested by hundreds of millions of people around the world. We've launched over 100 improvements to Google Apps in the last year, and the pace of innovation continues to increase.

Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Google Groups to Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users. Google Groups is one of our most widely used applications, enabling everyone from the local hiking club to the family next door to create mailing lists and discussion forums. Now employees within a company can create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.



Google Groups is a boon for IT administrators too. After enabling the new service from the administrative control panel (add "user-managed groups"), users can start managing their own groups without burdening administrators for support. Administrators can still set group policies and manage other group settings. If you want to learn more, check out our post on the Enterprise Blog.

Google Groups is just one of the many consumer features that we've tailored for the enterprise since we launched Google Apps for businesses nearly three years ago, and we're looking forward to bringing more innovation to our customers in the months and years ahead.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps