How to Leverage Google Wave for Business

    Google’s Wave collaboration platform has already generated early interest among both consumers and enterprises. Corporates are going to use Wave for collaboration on writing documents, decision-making and co-ordinating department workflows. The real time collaboration is going to help delicate business matters like contract negotiation. But one of the most interesting aspect of Wave is to handle custom apps and that will give businesses significant leverages.

“Google is a company whose products usually start by capturing the imagination of consumers and then business gets interested but we have already had an enormous amount of interest [from companies],”  said Lars Rasmussen, Google’s software engineering manager and co-creator of Wave.

• Many Companies use Outlook and Exchange today. If Wave is useful enough, some users of Outlook, Exchange, Notes, or even SharePoint could be persuaded to switch, either in whole or just for a part of their workflow in Wave. Google reinvented email and instant-messaging in a connected world. Today messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. A message (a wave) is a shared communications space where items are drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.
• Wave helps employees collaborate in simplistic way. Today many corporates use Microsoft Share Point as Document Management System. If you’re working with a document in SharePoint, you have to ”check it in” and “check it out,”. Thus,  it makes hard for multiple people to contribute in real-time. But Wave provides the ability to select groups and individuals who they want to share content in a much more easier way. Because the content is Web-based, they can update it in real-time.
• Wave is open-source. If you want, you’ll be able to run Wave on your internal corporate network. You don’t have to use Google’s infrastructure. Anyone can build a wave server and operate, similar to anyone can run their own SMTP server.
• You can run Google Wave on cloud ie. using the Google infrastructure. That means nothing (images, songs, docs etc) will be stored on your computer.You can reduce your Corporate IT cost this way.
• You can embed a Wave into a web page. Instead of a chat room , you can add a Wave on your company’s website and start customer service through it. Instead of static comments, you can carry on real-time conversation via Waves. Conversations are easily shared with embeds.
• Google Wave also incorporates Wiki style functionality which is an important feature for businesses.  If anybody writes anything within a Google Wave, that can be edited by anyone else, because all conversations are shared on this platform. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation.
• Wave’s drag and drop feature is not only a good communication feature, you can also use it as a project management tool for your company. Company can use it as communication as well as file sharing platform. You can build your entire project and time management with the help of this tool.
• Google enhanced the beauty of Wave by writing Extensions. They are just like firefox add-ons and can be categorized into two areas. 1>Robots: Robots are applications which run in the “cloud” and can modify state within the wave itself. 2> Gadgets: It is a small application and runs within the client.
  Developers and designers will be able to sell Extensions to their clients or to a wider audience. That may be a potential source for huge income for a businesses.