Google Apps takes another step toward wooing the enterprise
Google today announced the release of a scripting tool that can help users automate tasks in Google Apps, such as changing values in Google Spreadsheets, creating calendar appointments and sending e-mail. The tool is available only for paying Google Apps customers, those who have the Google Apps Premier Edition, and the Education Edition.
Google clearly envisions this tool as being a winner for the office worker bee. All of the examples that Google offers of how the tool can be used involve office tasks such as filling out expense reports, filling out timesheets, tracking trouble tickets.
To access the new feature, Google Apps Premier and Edu domains will, from this day forward, see “Scripts” in the Google Spreadsheets “Tools” menu.
Even for those who have no interest in yanking out client-based Office apps (like Microsoft Office) in favor of Google Apps, features such as this one should be of interest. Notice how easily the feature is deployed. Google simply adds a button to the software-as-a-service interface and wham, there you go. Compare that to a Windows Update process. Because you can use the script to build your own custom functions, this tool is clearly an attempt to make Google Apps more appealing to the enterprise. If there is a particularly important feature to your users that is keeping you for moving away from a desktop Office suite, you may be able to build it yourself.
The Google Apps team has already built nearly a dozen sample scripts and tutorials. One of them is the first step to an entire SOA based on Apps. According to Google, the tutorial “Leveraging Google App Engine services from scripts” will teach you how to create a Google Apps Script that communicates with a web service built on Google App Engine.
Here is the official Google video that demonstrates Apps Script.
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