Google is now offering Groups to its Google Apps Premier and Education Edition users.

Google Groups till now, has only been offered as a service to consumers. As one of the “most widely used applications”, introducing Groups to the Premier and Education Editions proves Google’s keen eye on stepping up the collaborative functions in Google Apps. This addition flouts the rules of speedy innovation, when compared to other companies’ long development cycles.

A picture to say it all, credits to ReadWrite Enterprise :

Google Groups allows “..employees within a company [to] create groups for their departments, their teams or their projects. Employees can use these groups as mailing lists, but they can also share documents, spreadsheets, presentations, calendars, videos and sites with groups, instead of many individual recipients. They can choose to receive communications directly to their email inbox, in a digest format, or in the Groups forum view, and can access all the information in the groups archive, without the intervention of an IT administrator.”

IT administrators however, would still need to activate Google Groups from Google Apps’ administrative control panel. They would be able to set group policies and manage group settings. From here on, users would be able to manage and monitor their own groups independently.

Here’s how the setup would look like for users:

Pretty straightforward, try it on Wednesday when it comes live, to increase your productivity at work!