Phone applications aren’t the only thing that Google’s been getting into recently. Today they announced the Google Apps Marketplace with a large and growing number of programs to aid you with your productivity.
The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google’s universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain’s data.
This means there are programs that can integrate directly with Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs and are all available to people running the company’s free hosted domain accounts. The apps, currently, are mostly for business users though this may change over time.
For businesses, this means that employees will have access to a great many new facilities including asset and contact management, faxing, sales and project management and productivity and workflow tools.
Could there be any privacy concerns about this though, especially given the recent arguments over privacy with Google’s Buzz service? You will need to give each application access to your other Google services, including Gmail and your calendar, but there should not be any privacy concerns given that this is a service you are explicitly opting in to.
This is useful for companies, especially smaller firms, as a huge range of very useful and valuable tools are now easy to deploy and use. Google will also reap the benefits of locking these business customers further into their ecosystem.
You can find out more about Google Apps Marketplace here.
