Google has an upcoming Personalized Start Page for Enterprise, according to some
sleuthing done by Garrett Rogers and
Scott Smith at Google Blogoscoped. Here’s an example Dell start page and the official
help page.
The Personalized Start Page will be one of the options available in the beta Apps For Your Domain service. Currently email, IM,
calendar and website creator is included in the package. In the Google Blogoscoped forum, there’s further
speculation about Writely integration and the ability to add
Adsense to it.
I think Google sees Personalized Start Page for Enterprise as a kind of ‘instant
Intranet’ option for small-medium businesses. While the example above is from Dell, it’s
unlikely a big corporation would ditch their (often hugely expensive) custom-made
Intranet. It could also be used as a customer-facing website, which the Dell example seems
to be. But I don’t think that’s all that appealing from a branding point of view.
You’ll note that the Dell page includes some special Dell gadgets (see image below).
This is where it starts to get interesting, as we morph into a world of componentized web
apps. That kind of functionality would be very useful on a company Intranet.
