Appropriately enough, David Politis, CEO and cofounder of BetterCloud, was phoning me from outside of Google’s mothership on 8th Avenue in NYC. We were chatting about his DomainWatch, which is a Google App that helps IT-types manage and monitor other Google Apps. It’s officially launching today, and definitely worth a try.
Apps for Business has seen impressive adoption numbers–over 4 million biz users including the likes of GM–since it was launched two years ago. So it’s a good sign that someone has seen there’s really a need for a sophisticated IT administration of Google documents, Gmail accounts, users, access rights, etc.
Politis was in a unique position to watch the App ecosystem take off. He and his team came out of Atlanta-based Cloud Sherpas, which is both an Apps reseller–the largest in fact-and a consulting firm. If a biz wants to rid itself of an infestation of Microsoft Office and Exchange, the Sherpas were the go-to guys to do the transition to Google’s cloud.
DomainWatch scans your App inventory.
Politis realized that the Apps environment needed a centralized dashboard with capabilities beyond that given by Apps’ own built-in panel. To explain his insight, Politis told me about a tech company, now a customer of BetterCloud, that had been using Google Documents and Gmail from the beginning.
“They had a lot of consultants who would come on board for a month or two months. When they left there was no central way to remove all their sharing rights”, Politis informed me.
Now in NYC with some of his original Sherpa team, Politis has made good on this idea with his just-out-of-beta DomainWatch. With this tool, an administrator can perform a bulk action of removing sharing rights rather than tediously doing this on a one-by-one basis.
There’s more, of course. Admins can quickly scan the entire domain and pull up data and graphics on the inventory of documents, calendars, and sites showing actual usage, resources involved, as well as security and access violations.
Politics told me about one company that’s relying on DomainWatch to decide whether to transition to Apps–watching the usage graphs to learn if Apps is gaining internal acceptance. As a former corporate cube dweller and victim of IT tyranny, I like the idea that DomainWatch shifts power to regular users, giving them the chance to vote on software with their mouse.
So is DomainWatch filling in a feature hole left by Google? I had to ask Politis. Not exactly. Politis felt strongly that Google Apps will be mostly a platform play: “Google has made APIs available to pool all of this information. There are things they are not going to do because they see value in third parties providing some of this.”
After a brief test drive, I’m tentatively sold on DomainWatch as part of an IT admin ecosystem–like what Norton with his utilities did for the early Microsoft platform, circa 20th century.
DomainWatch offers a free 30-day trail, and after that it’s $8 per user.