Google adds 25GB mailboxes to Gmail
Danny Gorog09 October 2007, 3:13 AM
In an effort to break Microsoft's dominance in the enterprise messaging market, Google has upgraded its Premier App offering with 25GB mailboxes and better security, compliance and policy management through Postini.
In an effort to further enhance Google Apps Premier Edition, Google has announced that all accounts will now have a limit of 25GB and have access to Postini email and security services.
Google is aggressively targeting businesses with this update, by allowing them to run their existing email solution side-by-side with Google Apps to test the advantages of their system.
Google last month announced it had acquired Postini, and has already integrated the service into Google Apps Premier edition.
According to Google's announcement, the new security, compliance, policy management, and message recovery services added to Google Apps Premier Edition give customers the ability to:
- Set configurable spam and virus filtering that are customized for the nature of the business, complementing the spam and virus filters already included in Google Apps.
- Centrally manage all outbound content policy, including adding footers to every message based on business policy rules, blocking messages with specific keywords or attachments, and preventing emails with sensitive company information from being sent.
- Create, manage, and report on policies that apply to user groups or individual users.
- Give administrators the option of visibility into all email within their organization for the purposes of compliance.
- Restore messages inadvertently deleted in the last 90 days
In addition, Google is also trying to coax more business and education customers to trial their solution by deploying a new email routing feature 'that allows organizations to run Google Apps alongside another email solution.
Using email routing, administrators can easily run a pilot program of Google Apps (without turning off the existing email system), migrate a subset of users to Google Apps, or segregate groups of users onto a separate email solution (such as the legal department, which may be subject to different policies).
All Google Apps Premier customers will receive 25GB limit per mailbox (an increase of 15GB over the initial 10GB allocation) at the same cost of $50USD per user account per year.
As a Google Apps customer I can vouch for the convenience and reliability of Google Apps. Adding these additional features will further enhance the usefulness and accessibility of Google]s hosted solution, and put the squeeze on Microsoft, which is still the dominant force in the enterprise messaging market thanks to its Exchange Server and Outlook lock-in combination.