Google Apps Premier Edition review

Giving all your documents to Google's servers to look after is another leap of faith. Who is to say that your files remain confidential to you if they're stored on another company's servers and every time you want to view or edit them they're transmitted over the internet, without encryption, to any PC you happen to be using at the time? If you're in an internet cafe somewhere, do you know the PC you're using isn't running spy software, logging all your keystrokes?

Google reserves the right to support the service by advertising and that means it will examine your documents to find keywords to trigger "relevant" adverts to be pushed to you. Do you want Google to know everything about your business? If it has all your documents, it will.

The Google applications themselves can be updated and changed at any time without any warning as Google releases new versions and, if you don't like the change or it breaks your documents, there is no way for you to go back to using the old version. There's also no way to get your documents out of Google Docs short of opening each document in turn and choosing to download a copy.

Conclusion

With terms and conditions running to many pages, including clauses that say the company can change the terms at any time, without telling you, we would be very wary about entrusting any of our data to Google. ?25 per user per year is a fair chunk of money if you look at it long term. Over three years it is about half the cost of a single OEM licence for Microsoft Office 2007 Small Business Edition and that gives you an awful lot more functionality. Other packages, such as OpenOffice, still have more features than Google Docs but are completely free.

All in all, Google Apps look far too simple, unfinished and, as Dr Johnson said: "Like a dog walking on its hind legs, it is not done well but you are surprised to find it done at all." If all you deal with is plain text, plus very little formatting, you don't mind your documents looking very simple and you can live with all the restrictions and possible breaks in service or loss of confidentiality then go for it - but there are other, far better, solutions out there.

Author: Simon Jones