Google Groups

Socialtext has released version 4.0 of its enterprise social platform, and the main new feature is the ability to create groups. At first glance it seems that it's a little feature, and the new release is issued only for PR. However, all genious is simple, and Socialtext - is one of those companies that earn good money on these things. Groups - online spaces for communication and collaboration - are important for enterprise. These may be department-centric spaces, or workspaces for project teams, or communities of interest (yes, they are also useful for business, as they bring staff together). But how easy it is to create an online group space, for example, in Sharepoint? It's complicated enough for not creating it at all.

Finally Google has made this simple and logical move - Google Groups have been added to its online suite of business applications. Google Groups allow you to create workspaces for departments or projects that include wiki, discussions and files. And also Google Groups allow you to quickly provide access to the various elements in Google Apps (documents, calendars, videos, sites) to certain group of employees. And when the user is excluded from the group, he loses access to all the associated resources. Groups in Google Apps can be created either by the administrator or users themselves, if the administrator has allowed this. The group owner set up access rules, public access options, invites participants and moderate their actions.