Gmail, other Google apps come out of beta

By Jake Widman
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 00:20

Development

The Google Apps suite of office applications has finally lost its "beta" label, which--for example--Gmail has carried for five years.

Matthew Glotzbach, the Google Enterprise director of product management, writes on the Official Google Blog that "we've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase."

With that in mind, the Google team have removed the "beta" logo from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Talk.

Glotzbach is quick to add, though, that the move doesn't mean the products are finished.

As an illustration of that, Google also announced the addition of "e-mail delegation"--the ability to screen and send e-mail for other people--and "e-mail retention"--the ability for administrators to establish e-mail purging policies.

These features are being tested and will be made available to Premium edition subscribers over the next few weeks.

In case you miss the "beta" logo, however, you can restore it to Gmail via the Labs tab in Settings.