I’ve spent most of the day experimenting with Google Apps and I am disappointed to say that it doesn’t live up to its potential. Basically it is a branded version of the mainline gmail, google calendar, and google docs and spreadsheets together with a simple and graphical web page editor. Unfortunately, none of these versions seem to work quite as well as the ones that work through google’s own domains. Further the expected integration with these bundled apps just doesn’t exist. It does allow you to set up several email addresses in your own domain and have them handled by the gmail client; that seems to be its only real benefit. The web page editor is far too limited to be of any use — it doesn’t integrate with any of the other services and has no content management features at all.

This isn’t what I was expecting at all — I was expecting to be wowed. The new google groups has real potential and I thought this would be a realization of some of that potential — it isn’t.