“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase,”

Well done Google, it's not flippin rocket science

thanks.

I've had a Yahoo! Mail account since 01-1995 I tried Gmail once but realized my Yahoo! mail wasn't broken & didn't need fixing.

“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase,” said Google’s Matthew Glotzbach in a blog post.

no shit.

gotta give that a fail if its taken 5 years for them to realise the bleedin obvious ...

But no one will want a product that has been in beta for 5 years, and has the uptime bowling ball thrown out the window.

The cynical dmins a weary of using it because they do not want to hand over their critical business data to an ADVERTISING AGENCY, despite what they say about respecting privacy. Lazy admins just don't want to spend the time moving over all of the company's e-mail over when they could just leave it on their own iron and get on with their day.

5 years in Beta? Even Longhorn wasn't that long in the tooth...

“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase”

So, just remove the "beta tag", of course, since people are too stupid to decide in each case whether "beta" means something or not. All that matter is just perceptions anyway, right? Haven't they learned with their "colleagues" that you should release alpha software and give it a version number of at least 3.11 or 95 or 10.3, just to pick some random examples, and then fix stuff as people buy the newer versions? :-)

I'm probably responding to a paid-for troll, but did you really try it? Can't imagine any better integration than having document come in via email, click on it & it is open in Google apps.

It works very well for our small company; free & no worries about setting up and maintaining a complex Exchange server. We also use a combination of MS Office 2007 (with Outlook) and Thunderbird/ OpenOffice; Google apps just happens to be the mail server and a easy way of sharing documents for people off-site.

Previous company I worked for had enforced low mailbox size restrictions for Outlook (and even then searching mail was crap in Outlook 2003/2007), now I still use Outlook but have a 6GB+ mail box accessible everywhere.. and search that works.

Being in beta was nonsense anyway; although they occasional tweaked features it has been stable & useful for years

...just what I want: my company's emails and documents on a US server where the US government (or any rival company who can hoodwink a judge) can just whip out a "hand-it-over" court order and Google has to comply.

Never mind the fact that I am not a US citizen, do not reside in the US, have no affiliates in the US and do not trade with US companies.

Yeah, I want me some of that!

Once Google make their Docs apps work across browsers, I'll consider it out of the beta phase. As it is, one can't scroll a spreadsheet if it's opened in Opera, which makes it all but useless!

How interesting can a story about a webmail client coming out of beta possibly be?

*yawn*

Gmail, is still in Beta in this part of the world (UK)