Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization's website, too. It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.
I've been using the beta of Google's hosted service for email for a few months now, so Google has been handling all of scriban.com's email with Gmail and Google Talk's web client. They've also thrown Google Calendar into the mix (neither of those last two features were advertised when they started offering this beta). The only difference between the service Google's announced today and what I'm using on scriban.com is Google Pages. That would be because I never turned the feature on in my Google Apps for scriban.com control panel. It's there, as is support for federating scriban.com XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk.
My personal experience is that It's worked extremely well both as a web mail service and as a POP and SMTP mail host. It looks and feels like Gmail (it's not very customizable save for the odd graphic here or there) but it has taken a load off my web hosting account. You still get Google advertising on the edges of your email messages.
Given the choice, however, of wrestling with configuring and provisioning your own mail, calendaring, chat, and web services for a group of users, or just letting Google handle it (for free, no less), it seems like a no-brainer.
My guess is that hosted Writely and Google Spreadsheet services are next to be added to the list, along with an SME and larger organization-scale product, providing services for hundreds and thousands of users.
