Google's business video service targets SharePoint users

It seems Google may not have taken a long weekend along with the rest of the world. Over the weekend, it rolled out Video Sharing for Business, adding yet another tool to its growing artillery of weapons against Microsoft Office.

Although Google's new service will mimic the company's free YouTube video offering in many ways, Google's new video service for businesses is a paid service available only through Google Apps, and -- as its name implies -- it is geared strictly to businesses. Also unlike YouTube, it includes access controls that can restrict viewing to designated individuals.

Google envisions video sharing as useful to businesses for purposes such as product demos and collaborative projects. While Cisco, Kontiki, and other enterprise content providers also offer video downloads, these companies do not allow for sharing among employees.

And while video sharing is technically feasible through Microsoft's SharePoint, as late as last week, the company was advising users to share videos as documents sent point-to-point, rather than as shared links to hosted streams.

In recent months, Google has been targeting Microsoft more intensively with its Google Apps marketing. For example, in mid-April of this year, Google added Salesforce.com's CRM Online services to its online word processor, spreadsheet, and e-mail applications suite, only a couple of weeks after Microsoft rebranded its own hosted CRM product, Dynamics CRM Live, in an effort to expand the market for the Microsoft-hosted service from SMBs to enterprise players.

Then, at the end of April, Google launched another challenge against Microsoft Office with Google Docs, a new capability for editing word processing documents while offline.

Google and Microsoft have also been battling each other head-to-head on other fronts of so-called "cloud computing." For instance, Google Health, a service unveiled in March, appears to be Google's answer to Microsoft's previously announced Health Vault.

Could future expansion be in the works for Video Sharing for Business? Although the initial service is limited to video clip downloads and on-demand streaming, Google also acquired last April video conferencing software from Swedish-based Marratech.