James Bennett, managing online editor at internal communications research and training company Melcrum Publishing, on how cloud technology could be the future of internal comms:

As business evolves and speeds up, we constantly need to adapt to our surroundings – more so as companies across the globe trim budgets and get used to a long-term recession. So what should companies do? Make mass redundancies, take a hatchet to hour-long lunch breaks, or – from an employee perspective – kidnap the chief executive in exchange for 10% more pay and a regularly filled fruit bowl?

All of these methods have been tried and none have worked perfectly. But it only takes one and the rest inevitably follow. The ‘one’ in this case being global services firm Rentokil that is switching all its 35,000 employees in 50 countries from 180 different email domains and 40 mail systems to ‘cloud based email’ (email that sits within a virtual online server and is managed by a cloud service provider – in this case Google) by 2010, saving them millions in costs and, at the same time, encouraging all employees to use a simpler, more integrated and collaborative set of tools. We all know how to use Google effectively; we don’t all know how to use Notes or Outlook. Genius! Well, not really, but like so many early adopters they got there first and this could be cost effective and efficient.

Google Apps is a service that allows you to use custom domain names with several Google products featuring various web applications with similar functionality to traditional office suites, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Talk, and Docs.

A report from researchers Forrester in January this year presented a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises. It argued that cloudbased email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees, while Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services – even for very large enterprises.

The low price point of Google Apps will almost inevitably be a massive draw. Forrester believes Google can make money at this price, and that the service will also be able to handle larger firms’ needs well.

However, Forrester was unsure how much focus Google would give to the service, that Google Apps still needs “better mobile support, an offline email and calendar client, and a clearer view of the product road map.”

It may have drawbacks now but once these are ironed out Rentokil’s journey into the relative unknown could turn out to be an internal communication masterstroke, bringing every employee closer together onto one system allowing them to share calendar information, chat live to one another, share documents and knowledge and have access to email translation and video.

Not only that, the system will also provide email access to 20,000 regular Rentokil PC users, as well as 15,000 on-the-road staff, eliminating the headache of how to reach thousands of remote workers. These employees, who did not originally have a company email account, will now be able to access Google mail from any internet-connected device such as a PDA, iPhone or home computer.

While thousands of communicators um and ahh about whether to even set up a Twitter account, others are leading the way into communications 2.0. For more on communicating to remote workers, see Far and away, p.20