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The original Google Apps bundle was launched in August 2006 and quickly proved popular with small business and educational bodies such as schools and universities, which were attracted by its low cost and ability to offer a web-based collaborative working environment.

Premier Edition will be sold on a per user basis, priced at $50 in all countries per account per year for the full suite of applications, along with telephone technical support, additional storage and access to system applications programming interfaces (APIs) not available to consumers using the free versions of the apps. The existing standard packages will continue to be offered free of charge to education and small business users.

While the Premier Edition is based on the same Gmail, Calendar and Talk services that Google offers for free to consumers, they include many changes and additional features exclusive to the paid-for service. For example, the business Gmail service can be attached to a bespoke business domain name rather than using the gmail.com and googlemail.com domains used by consumer users of the service. Companies can also add their own branding to the Gmail environment, changing colour schemes and replacing the Google logos with their own.

The service also comes with a 99.9 per cent availability guarantee and 10GB of storage, features not available to consumers

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or via the free versions of the bundle.

"We are adding business-specific features to the Premier Edition, such as the 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee as well as a telephone technical support service similar to what we already provide enterprise search appliance customers with" said Robert Whiteside, Google's head of enterprise for the UK and Ireland. He declined to confirm where the call centres would be based.

However, it is the opening up of various system APIs to aid integration with existing business applications that will offer the biggest incentive to potential corporate users. The APIs that Google is opening up to develops allow for data migration between apps, provisioning user accounts, single sign-on authentication and configuring and managing email gateways, all of which should make the process of integrating the apps suite with existing client-side applications, intranets and other back-end resources simpler.

Google has already attracted several interested multi-national corporate users including General Electric and Proctor and Gamble.

'So much of business now relies on people being able to communicate and collaborate effectively. We are interested in evaluating Google Apps for the easy access it provides to a suite of web applications, and the way these applications can help people work together' said Gregory Simpson, chief technology officer for General Electric.

Google also announced that all editions of Google Apps now include Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the company's web-based word processor and spreadsheet applications that are currently in beta. Both are based on technology acquired from Google's takeover of Writely. All versions of Google Apps now also include improved access support for BlackBerry devices.

'While there are no new features being introduced into Docs & Spreadsheets at this moment, we felt the time was right to introduce them into the Google Apps suite' added Whiteside.