Google Apps Sync for Outlook No Longer Screws Up Outlook
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 1, 2009 at 7:52 AM PT
Google’s effort to erode to Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise productivity space is back on track. The company has repaired its so-called “Exchange killer”–Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.
Launched in early June, the plug-in provided a way to run Microsoft Outlook on Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange. Sadly for Google, the plug-in didn’t play well with Outlook, most notably making its data inaccessible to Windows Desktop Search. Now, after a few weeks of troubleshooting and some help from Microsoft (that must have made for some interesting conference calls), the company has found a solution to the problem and a fix has been released.
“We worked closely with Microsoft to address two issues that we shared recently, and we appreciate their help,” Google Apps Senior Product Manager Chris Vander Mey said in a company blog post Tuesday. “The Windows Desktop Search feature now works, so you can choose between the native Outlook search, which has been available since launch, and Windows Desktop Search to find information in Outlook.”
With that little snafu resolved, it’s now back to business for Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), with the former attacking the latter’s search business and the latter steadily encroaching on the former’s software turf. We now return you to our previously scheduled hostilities…
