Google Office - One Step Closer to Microsoft's Suite

Google Apps, the suite of tools that is often compared with Microsoft's Office, gets new functions that make the application easier to use and to replace the old solutions in large organizations. The email migrations tool helps organizations and schools replace their old email systems in a matter of hours without losing any message or information. Vikaram Gupta, Software Engineer, Google Apps, says that the new ability supports an impressive amount of messages, offering as example the Central Piedmont Community College that transferred no less than 3 million emails in 24 hours.

"Today, it becomes a lot easier for organizations and schools to start using Google Apps email services without leaving any of their valuable email data behind. Our new self-service mail migration tools enables administrators using the Premier and Education Editions to easily copy existing mail from an IMAP server over to Google Apps," the Google employee said.

"Now businesses and schools can spend less time worrying about "maintaining infrastructure" and focus more on the things that matter most to them -- like healthcare or educating students."

Some time ago, when the Mountain View company released the Google Apps suite, it was rumored that the search giant plans to compete with the more famous Microsoft Office and attract the same category of users. The advantages could be numerous because Google offers only web-based products, most of them along with a freeware license.

It's been a while since Google released the suite and, as the time passed by, it included more utilities. Beside Docs, Calendar, Spreadsheets and Gmail, the search giant is also planning to design a presentation tool to challenge Microsoft's PowerPoint and complete the Office suite. The Google Apps suite is available in multiple flavors, including one freeware for all the users that allows us to use the tools without any fee.