Tuesday, October 06, 2009

What I want from Google Apps

I personally rely on Google products quite a bit: apps, reader, gmail, etc. At work, it is even more with office apps, calendars, etc. I love my Android, with all of its shortcomings, because of the seamless integration into the Google Suite. I really want Google to continue the path of integrating all of its products into the Google Apps Suite.

Google Voice integration would be killer! Beyond just making it available, I would love to be able to purchase a "block" of numbers so that it can be consecutive. In addition, we would love to have additional numbers available with group management for customer service and sales lines, with multiple people being able to manage their accounts. This would create a PBX in the sky and group access to voicemails, etc.

Google Reader in Google Apps would assist in our sharing of stories, etc. There are a couple of specific areas that would assist:
  1. "Shared" reading list where everyone could have a group of subscriptions that are centrally managed. Would encourage reading materials that we believe should be read consistently. Would be even better if they could be broken down by employee type - engineers, sales, marketing, etc.
  2. Ability to share within the company - a protected list. Only our domain users could read the comments and share stories.
  3. Ability to post directly to our internal dashboards, etc - again, only accessible to our domain users.
Contacts that we can share. I would like to be able to categorize/tag contacts that everyone has access to in the company. Customers, partners, leads, etc. While we have Salesforce and Zendesk, the ability to have a single list that is shared and accessed directly through my phone, mail interface, etc, is a huge time saver. When time is of the essence, having to search my contacts, then Zendesk then Salesforce is really a waste of time and energy. Give me an api and the ability to share with users in my domain - would make it so much better.

This functionality would greatly assist us and provide us with better tools for sharing information, interacting with our customers and growing our business.