OKCOOL

I contacted Google yesterday about joining their partner program for their Google business products (email, calendar etc). We were interested in this because it’s something we like to offer all of our SimpleWeb customers (in fact we recommend it).

Unfortunately, at the moment, we’re restricted to setting everything up manually as you need to be a premium customer to get access to the API. Our customers rarely have the budget to spend the £25 per annum per account their premium service costs, and the free service is so good, so there’s little or no point in us becoming premium customers.

I was pleasantly surprised to get an email back from Google stating:

“If your clients are businesses with their own domains, Partner Edition is not the right product for you. You will benefit from our forthcoming reseller offering.”

A shame that the Partner program isn’t right for us. On closer inspection, their Partner Edition is intended for ISPs that wish to offer lots of emails@their-domain.com – this seems slightly strange in this day and age. Anyway, as stated in their email to me, it’s no good for our customers who all have their own domains.

It’s interesting though to see that Google intend to offer a reseller program for their business apps. Hopefully this would give us access to the API so that we can tie it in to our management interface at a more realistic cost.

I fired back another email to Google asking when they thought this service offering would be launched. I was even more surprised to receive another, albeit short, prompt response stating:

“Perhaps next quarter.”

Not exactly specific information on the release schedule but it’s nice to know. I shall keep an eye out for further information on the subject.