July 13, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Google has announced that it is making the educational version of its Google Apps product available free to nonprofit organizations in the United States.
The collection of communication and collaboration tools includes e-mail and calendar programs, Internet-based telephone and text-messaging services, and word-processing, spreadsheet, and Web-publishing applications. Google charges businesses $50 a year for the tools and services.
The programs — and the data contained within them — are all stored on the Mountain View, Calif., company’s servers, so organizations that use the service would not have to maintain them on their own computer networks. The educational version of the product includes free technical support and tools to help organizations transfer information from other e-mail and calendar programs into Google Apps.
“The reality is it’s difficult from a complexity standpoint and from a cost perspective for organizations and universities to supply those types of IT services in the traditional way to their users,” says Matthew Glotzbach, product management director at Google Enterprise.
He says that Google Apps could help nonprofit organizations take much of the time and money they currently spend maintaining their technology systems and put them toward their missions.
Google’s announcement — which was made at a gathering of nonprofit leaders organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network — comes on the heels of the company’s release of a free version of its mapping software, Google Earth Outreach.
This spring the company formed a partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create online maps that document the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.
“We’re always looking at ways we can take our technologies and use them to serve as catalysts for education and action in global and local policy issues for all types of organizations,” says Mr. Glotzbach.
More information about Google Apps and Google Earth Outreach is available on the company’s Web site.
