Last week we told you about how Jive is becoming a platform company by introducing its own apps platform and marketplace. And this week we took a look at the most popular apps in the Google Apps Marketplace. But there’s a lingering question: is this really what IT wants, or is it just what vendors say IT wants?
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Personally, I think the promise of giving users best-of-breed applications within a common architecture is a great one – and the app store model seems like a good way to deliver it. But I have to admit, I’d still be skeptical about rolling one out if I were in charge of supporting it. That’s more apps for the help desk staff to support and potentially more apps for system administrators to test against browser configurations. And those are just the issues I can think of off the top of my head.
On the other hand, users may be able to solve more problems by finding tools better fit for their jobs. Deploying applications will be easier. Some support will likely be offloaded to individual app vendors. So it could end up being less work.
What do you think? Are app stores something you want?
Also: If you would like to suggest ideas for future polls, feel free to e-mail me at klint@readwriteweb.com.
Photo by Shereen M
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