Google's new Outlook connector for Google apps is a big deal

I disagree deeply with Garett Rogers over at ZDNet who wrote:

Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google Apps, but there are several larger issues that need to be addressed before there is any kind of mass adoption.

Letting users use what they want to use (Outlook) while being able to use a back-end from Google that allows 25GB per user (and not the fantastically annoying 100 MEGA bytes offered up by most in-house Exchange admins because they want to make their lives easier and their users lives hellish) is absolutely brilliant. This is about lowering barriers to adoption and user behaviour change barriers are a big deal.

With this move, IT owners now get to provide better uptime (Gmail’s effective 99.9% uptime is frankly higher than many corporate email systems or at least close to par), more storage (250x more on average),  a much more functional web interface than Outlook Web Access, and native Blackberry push email all while saving 66% of their operational costs. I believe that enterprise adoption of Gmail will begin to increase rapidly.