Google gives Microsoft another jab and release Google Apps plug-in for Outlook

Well this should just get the Google fans all a ga-ga. This morning the web search giant and wannabe threat to Microsoft’s enterprise desktop dominance announced that it was releasing Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (and they make fun of Microsoft naming of applications). This plug-in will let you use Microsoft Outlook with the Premier and Education editions of Google Apps.

Some of the key features are

• Email, calendar, and contacts synchronization. For email, the plug-in uses the offline Gmail protocol, which is much faster than IMAP or other methods.

• Free/Busy lookup and Global Address List functionality, which makes it easy to schedule meetings with your colleagues, regardless of whether they use Outlook’s calendar or Google Calendar.

• A simple, two-click data migration tool which allows employees to easily copy existing data from Exchange or Outlook into Google Apps.

Here’s a 3 minute video to give you an idea of how it works

And of course the typical gushing glowing third party glowing report of how much they like this new offering from Google. In this cae it a couple of IT execs from Genentech and Avago (prepare spin shields)