If you belong to an organization that uses Google Apps for Work, Google has enabled an application installation from the Google Apps Marketplace without involving the system administrator. The Google Apps Marketplace product manager, Chris Han, announced the change on a Google blog explained that users will now “have greater access to apps that help you work faster, more efficiently and collaboratively.” The Google Apps Marketplace has a wide selection of applications including accounting packaging to-do lists and project management. The announcement explained that K-12 EDU domains are defaulted off this change. Now, some domains will not want to give their users the ability to add third party applications and should system administrators wish to disable this feature, it may be done through the Admin Console | Marketplace Apps | Gear Icon / Manage Apps | Manage Access to Apps option.
To the uninitiated, Google Apps for Work is essentially a means of bringing Google’s services into the workplace. More than five million businesses have switched to Google and their employees are benefiting from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Hangouts, Google Drive together with Google Docs. The cheaper option is $5 per user, per month and this includes 30 GB of space per user. The more expensive option is twice the price at $10 per user, per month and this comes with a minimum of 1 TB of space (unlimited for businesses of 6 employees or more) and Google Vault and eDiscovery (this is a data mining facility, which could be helpful for lawsuit purposes). For the money, Google provide their 99.9% uptime, administrator controls and of course, their “access anywhere” policy, which means the workforce can use a number of different devices and platforms to work within the Google framework.
One of the nifty features of Google Apps for Work is Google Sites, which makes it easy to create and publish internal websites (or Intranet pages) for colleagues. Updates to applications and services are rolled out across your estate with the minimum of fuss and effort from the administrator. Do you work for an organization that uses Google Apps for Work? If you do, will this change make life easier for you – you won’t need to ask your Service Desk to install an application for you? And if your business does not use Google Apps for Work, maybe it’s time to ask them to consider the switch?