Hacker team will help to push Google Apps

Google opened a new front in the war for business users. At that time Google pushes the idea that companies appreciate openness of business applications, i.e. the possibility to import/export their data to/from these apps. At the same time the leading business software vendors (IBM, Microsoft) use to lock user data and don't provide easy tools to export it in the needed format. The new Google's project Data Liberation Front contains information about how to export data from Google applications. For example it gives guidelines of how to use GMail over POP3 and IMAP protocols, or how to export Google Calendar in ICAL format.

When introducing the project in the company blog, Google representative gave some details of the nearest liberation efforts: Google Sites export to HTML, and bulk Google Docs export to OpenOffice and MS Office formats.



But the Data Liberation Front team will not only "liberate" the data stored inside Google applications. Their mission - is also to liberate data that is (still) stored in the competitive systems. For example, recently Google introduced tools that enable to import data from Hotmail, Yahoo, MS Exchange, Lotus Domino. So the Google developers will "crack" the third-party applications to help users move their data to Google Apps.

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