Well here is a bit of a rant, I’m a firm believer in Google Apps for small business and for vanity domains, they offer a fabulous email service and a whole pile of other excellent tools for the great price of $0. However…
One major bug bear I have is that those of us with Google Apps can’t use the new Google Plus, Google Profiles or Google Buzz. When we try to use these services we get the following message:
At this time, Google profiles aren’t available for Google Apps users. You can sign up for a profile using a consumer Google account.
I appreciate that this Google say it is not a small job to set this up for Google Apps users, and the Google Enterprise Blog said it was coming “soon” and that was back in March 2011.
My opinion on this is that us guys who like Google are likely to have a high opinion of Google products and would likely be keen adopters of their product suite! It seems that Google Profile is the lynch pin to the whole product suite of Googles social offering, so please Google we can’t wait for you do get Google Profiles working for us Apps users 🙂
Update: you can fill in the following to be undated by Google when they implement either a Beta or a roll out of Google Profiles for Google Apps! Click here.
3 Comments
They also promised us Google Buzz in early 2010. We still don’t have that. The worst part of all of this is Google’s silence. They made a promise and are now pretending they never did. They could say we don’t have it until 2012. That’d be fine!
All the delay has shown me is I get along just fine without Profiles, Buzz, Check-ins, +1, and Google Plus. Maybe I would get along fine without any Google products?
Thanks for the comments John, I can see where you’re coming from 🙂 Google have implied in the past that it isn’t a quick and easy job, it just strikes me as strange they didn’t build in this functionality in the first place.
I’m guessing the PR folks didn’t check with the engineering folks before promising this.
Granted, I’m sure it’s way more complicated than this. But I don’t get why they can’t offer a switch on the domain administrator’s panel allowing email addresses on that domain be treated like any other Google account. This way they could allow those of us who aren’t businesses to get busy evangelizing Google Plus while giving Google time to get it right for businesses.
I could use my @gmail.com, but I’m worried about the unintended consequences of that. Also I want to be known by my primary email address, not some one off @gmail.com address.
As I said before, if Google were just to publish an update I would be happy as would others I have talked to about this. I’m really afraid this is going to go the way of Buzz and Google will quietly forget about it.