Having completed its acquisition of e-mail service provider
Postini last month, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is ready to enhance its
enterprise software service, Google Apps Premier Edition, with
Postini's technology.
Google on Wednesday plans to begin offering policy management
and message recovery services for business customers using Gmail as
part of their Google Apps Premier Edition subscriptions.
"We're very proud of the Google facilities for their raw
horsepower but they didn't have the configurability that you might
need in the enterprise," said Matt Glotzbach, product manager for
Google Enterprise.
Policy management allows for the creation and management of
corporate policies for individuals or groups. It means that
organizations can add footers to every outgoing message, for
example, or block messages with certain keywords from being sent
out. It provides IT administrators with access to e-mail records
for auditing and compliance purposes.
The message recovery feature allows administrators to recover
messages that have been deleted in the past 90 days.
Postini's anti-spam and anti-malware technology also is being
extended to users of Google Apps Premier Edition. It will allow
administrators to add customized spam and virus filtering on top of
the protection that's already a part Gmail.
In addition, Google is increasing the amount of storage
available to Google Apps Premier Edition customers from 10 Gbytes
to 25 Gbytes.
"This gives users what we perceive as really unlimited storage,"
said Glotzbach.
It may not quite be unlimited, but it's certainly more than the
100 Mbyte or 250 Mbyte mailbox limits imposed by many organizations
in an effort to, as Postini founder Scott Petry put it, keep their
Exchange servers from choking.
Despite the addition of these new features and benefits, the
price for the service remains unchanged at $50 per user per
year.
The new policy management system doesn't cover Google Talk,
Google's instant messaging application. However, Postini's service
offers IM controls, making it likely that Google Apps Premier
Edition customers will see Google Talk gain policy controls at a
later date.
Google also is extending its free trial of Google Apps Premier
Edition for existing Postini customers, as well as new Postini
customers who sign up by the end of the year, through June
2008.