Having spent many years of my career supporting Microsoft products (not so much for the love of them), I really feel that Google has moved the business of hosted products to equal if not the better choice.
Google Docs has brought the office suite that you can take anywhere. Something Microsoft failed to provide until Office 360. Though I must admit Google Docs has a flaw that is hard to over come. In App support. If you have an application that exports a word or excel format and have your office suite hosted in the cloud then you lose export functionality in that application. Now I am sure there is either an API or plugin to fix this. Which leaves you limited to your vendor support.
Gmail has become an email service yet to be matched by any other out there. I have about a dozen email addresses from all sorts of mail providers. In previous years I used a few accounts for spam, family, business, RSS feeds you name it. At the time it was easier to sign up with a service and filter traffic through different accounts. With Gmail it is complex yet simple enough to precess a large inbox and have the noise out of the way as soon as you check your messages. It's unmatched.
Google+ in Google Apps. Facebook has brought a lot of attention to business. Social media has become a perfect marriage for marketing products to broad audiences with very little effort. Almost every business markets themselves on social media. Google+ allows companies to tie their employees social side of business right into their Google Apps profile. Though Google+ currently does not feature business integration as far as company profile, I can see no reason why it would not be a comfortable choice for companies who use Google Apps to adopt when made available. As a company, the ability to show your company enthusiasm by having your employees Google+ profile attached to a company Google+ page creates a positive image for the company. It's the elevator pitch of a life time if done right. "Hi, this is our company. Here is our marketing team. Here is what our company is about. This was our goal we hit. This is why we love you as a customer!" You can add the company to a circle. More so you can drill down and add just the marketing team because that is who you normally deal with. Then in the marketing team you pull out a few favorites and add the to a more personal circle because you have common interest or business with them specifically. What better way is there to be social other than face to face. Done correctly Google+ could tie social media into the business suite with less headache and effort.
There are quite a few tools tucked away into Google Apps but the last one I will cover today is message continuity. As I have only begun to discover this function the positives are weighing heavy for the business application of this feature. Some businesses will always swear by exchange. Which is fine. To each their own, but having the option to duplicate your mail in the cloud to extremely reduce down time for messages during outages is hands down important. Some Postini configurations, additions and configurations to exchange, and you have a redundant mail client that goes with you and synchronizes between Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. This my friends has become the best of both worlds answer that will make cloud backup a positive note for business.
