Google March 15 moved to improve its Google Apps upgrade deliveries, adding a rapid release and scheduled release tracks to help IT administrators prepare for application upgrades.

Google hosts Google Apps, including Google Docs, Gmail and other collaboration applications on its cloud computing infrastructure. Google's practice has been to automatically provision upgrades for those apps to customers.

While this approach saves IT managers the time and costs of performing software upgrades and managing installers, some companies want to better plan for new features.

"We're always excited to bring you the newest features as soon as they're ready, but we've heard from some customers with complex IT environments that they'd like more notice before new features are deployed to their users," said Anna Mongayt, from Google's Enterprise Operations.

Google's new feature release process lets Google Apps admins have more control over when new features are provisioned to their companies' Google Apps installations.

Admins may choose the Rapid Release track to have access to new features as soon as the features have completed testing and quality assurance. Alternatively, Apps admins may select the Scheduled Release, which provisions new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the initial release of those features.

For more, read the eWEEK article: Google Apps Admins Get Rapid, Scheduled Release Tracks.

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