Google Desktop 2.0 beta

Last night I downloaded Google Desktop 2.0 beta at home. I stayed far away from the first release of Google Desktop, I think, simply because it did not offer me anything I wanted. This one has many more features, but I’m still on the fence about it.

Initially it appears to be a neat tool to have around, a cool reference, but nothing that totally grabs my attention. What made me really want to give it a good look this time is the enterprise edition. According to the site:

Google Desktop Search for Enterprise helps your employees find what they’re looking for on their computers as easily as they find information on Google.com. Enterprise features provide enhanced security, centralized configuration and easy company-wide installation. Perhaps best of all—it’s free.

It looks fully configurable, it can be deployed enterprise wide and it plays well with group policy. Pretty cool. I’ll be playing with it at church as soon as I have a chance, it may be awhile actually but it’s now on my to-do list. I figured using it at home is the place to start.

My initial observations:

• indexes all of your g-mail – doesn’t G-Mail itself already do that for me?
• indexes every page you visit on the web – nice feature…no secrets
• pushes google news to your desktop
• has a notepad, called Scratch Pad – kinda cool
• weather – aka ForecastFox (Firefox extension)
• indexes all files on your computer – good for some, I tend to know where I save everything
• oh yeah, Google search bar – always a good thing
• indexes your photos – I don’t guess I have any photos on my PC

There’s really nothing new here that I don’t already get through Firefox. But it does make me wonder, is this the precursor to the rumored Google browser? Hmmmmmmmm

So where is the added value? As I said earlier, for some, there may be value, for myself, not so much. But there’s nothing wrong with it, it is a quality tool.

The enterprise edition will have to really knock my socks off and show me some added value for my users. Otherwise, why bother? I can make it a priority to install it and push it out, but then there’s the training and answering questions etc. If I can’t justify it in my mind, it’s certainly not going to make sense to others.

Time will tell.