Google Apps Team Edition makes collaboration easier

While Google's online office suite might not have all the features of Microsoft Office, one area where Google's word processor, spreadsheet, calendar, and IM client excel is in letting you easily collaborate with other users. Want to share a Word document or spreadsheet with other users, just click the share button.

But that only works if the people you want to share with have already registered for Google Apps accounts. Now Google has launched a new version of Google Apps that makes it a whole lot easier to get a group of people registered quickly.

Google Apps Team Edition packs all the basic features like Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Talk. But when you sign up for Team Edition, Google Apps will automatically recognize your company or school email address and locate other users affiliated with the same organization and add them to your contact list. Now when you want to share a document or send a message, you should have a list of all the other people who have registered for Google Apps with email addresses from the same domain.

For example, if your email address is address@domain.com, you can share documents with any other uses who has a @domain.com address. Alternately, you can choose to share your documents with everyone that has a @domain.com address. While Google Apps Team Edition doesn't offer any features that you can't get with a basic account, the move should help Google grow its user base by making signup much easier.

That said, we've tried to sign up several times today, and we keep getting a server error message from Google. Hopefully that problem will be fixed soon.

Tags: collaboration, docs, google-apps, google-apps-team-edition, google-talk, spreadsheet