When Google Apps left beta back in July, Google announced that it would be adding a set of enterprise-specific features to make Premier Edition more attractive to businesses. Today Google has made good on that promise by supporting email retention and delegation for Apps customers.
Gmail is an awesome Web mail program, but it was missing some functionality essential for adoption in larger enterprises. One of those aspects was the ability for businesses to set company-wide retention policies in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Another one, the icing on the cake really, was email delegation that allows users to let others manage email for them.
Retention
Email retention policy is an important aspect of regulatory compliance in the enterprise. Depending on your sector, there may be both industry and government rules to follow when it comes to what email is retained, how it’s stored, and for how long. The Premier Edition of Apps will allow your administrators to set policies, starting today.
Delegation
Email delegation is really a specialized feature aimed at executives and administrative assistants, rather than something attractive to everyone in an enterprise. But allowing that kind of business-specific functionality in Apps is definitely an important step if Google wants to seriously compete with Microsoft and IBM as they push the “Going Google” campaign.
