A new security tool lets enterprise IT groups set access and share policies for employees, including mobile users, who are working with the online Google Apps suite.

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to halt efforts to bring the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) into the Google Apps services used by 17,000 other Los Angeles employees.

2012 will be the year when Google Apps will chip away at the Microsoft Office market, as the rise of mobile devices and social media could make managing a work-life balance impossible, Gartner has claimed.

Seven ISVs have formed a consortium to integrate their Google Apps add-on products and offer discounted bundles, outside of Google's control.

Imagine what would happen if all the Google engineers turned rogue and held the world’s Gmail accounts to ransom. Or if aliens attacked earth and wiped California off the map.

The shortfalls of Google Apps will likely resonate with the inordinate amount of Microsoft shops in the industry. Years of investment in SharePoint developers, Exchange support teams and business processes built around the fickle aspects of Microsoft Office and its ribbon interface cannot be discarded easily. That’s ultimately where Microsoft’s strength is likely to reside. No matter when its Office 365 bundle is released, and despite numerous attempts to forge links between legacy applications and Google Apps, the complexity of a migration for a large organisation would likely be a headache most CIOs are eager to avoid. At least, that can be said for Coca Cola Amatil CIO, Barry Simpson.

Ultimately, some of the problems facing Microsoft’s Cloud strategy are those affecting many of its long-standing product suites. “Clearly Microsoft is trying to back-solve that problem to the legacy product set and clearly that’s problematic,” AAPT’s chief operating officer and effective CIO, David Yuile, says.

IT behemoths, Microsoft and Google, have for years been embroiled in battles over who would control the move by different industries to the Cloud. Since at least 2007, Australian universities and education authorities eager to outsource their email have turned to either provider in lieu of limited competition from the market. For the next battle, however, the stakes are higher. Both Google and Microsoft are betting all of their chips on a sector that is likely to prove much more lucrative than any before it: Enterprise.

It is 8pm midweek and three senior executives at Altium are working on a document they need first thing the next day — a presentation to staff about behavioural change. The program manager is editing text; the company president is asking questions about the program; and CIO, Alan Perkins, is answering his president’s questions.

Rentokil Initial has signed the biggest enterprise Google Apps Premier Edition deal yet, adopting the internet services giants' SaaS offering as the standard email platform across its six operating divisions.