Google will drop the “beta” label from Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk in one fell swoop on Tuesday to rid its Apps communication and collaboration suite of this problematic tag that spooks many IT managers and CIOs.
Google is also announcing specific enhancements to Apps, including the ability for someone to delegate use of their mailbox and for administrators to set policies and parameters for e-mail retention.
Matthew Glotzbach, Google Enterprise product management director, acknowledged that from the outside the decision to graduate Gmail, Calendar, Docs and Talk out of beta at once may seem arbitrary.
However, the removal of the beta label from those services is rather the “culmination” of a years-long process of maturation through which the products have exceeded internal goals for reliability, quality and usability, he said.
Glotzbach also granted that Google lacks a uniform set of criteria across its different product groups for determining when a product should and shouldn’t carry the beta label.
“We haven’t had a consistent set of standards across the product teams. It has been done individually. We’re going to fix that,” he said.
While the beta issue is less important for consumers, it is a major roadblock for the Enterprise group’s efforts to market Apps, especially when dealing with large companies and their IT managers and CIOs.
“This helps ease the minds of IT executives at companies that have looked at beta as a potentially distracting or concerning label,” Glotzbach said.
Now, Apps, which also includes the Sites wiki and site creation application and Google Video, a YouTube-based video-sharing service for business, will have no beta-labeled components.