Google Apps Users to Get Picasa, Blogger

Google has finally made the announcement a lot of Google Apps users have been waiting for. The company plans to open up the service to include more Google products like Blogger or Picasa. These won’t be dedicated versions of the products for Google Apps, but the same services anyone can sign up with. The only major difference is that users will be able to access them with their Google Apps account, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between their work and personal account.

“9 of the top 20 requests from Google Apps customers are for their accounts to work with more services from Google, not just for the core suite of messaging and collaboration applications. Later this year we’ll dramatically accelerate customer access to innovation, and give users the convenience of using any Google service allowed by their administrator from a single account affiliated with their organization,” Dennis Troper, product management director, Google Apps, wrote.

Users could get access to Blogger, Picasa, Reader, AdWords and virtually any other Google product. Of course, this won’t be out of the box, the Apps admins will have to select the products for which the users will get access. However, this does provide a very good opportunity for Apps users to get the benefits of having a photo-sharing tool, for example, but also having it integrated with the other Apps tools they are using.

This approach, of just enabling users to log in with their Apps accounts rather than providing dedicated versions of the Google products also works well for Google. The company doesn’t plan on offering support for these services at first, and they won’t be included in the default support and service level agreement. However, this may change in time. The switch will be complete in autumn 2010, but admins can start using the new platform, which enables them to integrate more Google services, this summer.