Web search giant Google has introduced a brace of upgrades to its online desktop applications to improve their viability in an enterprise setting.

The capacity of the enterprise version of GMail email software has been increased from 10GB to 25GB per user. It has also added anti-spam and compliance functionality from Positini, the web-based email management provider it acquired in July 2007. This includes the ability to recover emails for up to 90 days after they have been deleted. 

In September 2007, Google announced that it had arranged a deal with Capgemini that would see the French IT services provider consult with enterprise clients interested in adopting the Premier Edition of its application suite.

“Capgemini's view [is] that employees in many organizations are not yet IT-enabled due to the high cost or marginal benefit available through traditional approaches,” Gartner analyst Ben Pring observed at the time.

“Capgemini would not align itself with Google and risk upsetting its relationship with Microsoft if it did not sense among its customer base of large multinational corporations a genuine interest in Google’s application initiatives,” he added. 

Other analysts are less convinced of the suitability of Google’s tools for use in the enterprise.

"Google has helped the industry question long-held beliefs and is contributing largely to the adoption of SaaS solutions," Burton Group analyst Guy Creese wrote in August 2007. "Unfortunately, Google can't capitalize on these market changes because GAPE currently has weaknesses that large enterprises cannot ignore."

The weaknesses Creese identified include an absence of role-based user provisioning and poor content management tools. At the time, he advised enterprise IT managers interested in adopting Google’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to wait for the product to mature.

Earlier this week, Microsoft added a little more detail to its software-as-a-service strategy. With regard to business clients, it will continue to focus on on-premise software, with the web being used as a delivery mechanism for ancillary functions such as online file sharing and integrated social networking.

This reveals that Microsoft is still conservative in its approach to SaaS, but as long as its rivals are providing identical or less mature products over the web, it can afford to be so.

No surprise in Microsoft's web strategy - October 2007
Google buys Postini - July 2007