Maybe you remember when two months ago Google bought the e-mail security company Postini for 625 million dollars in cash. Postini was responsible for producing a technology used to encrypt and archives e-mails and instant messages and which can be used to protect a company’s all web-based communications.

Today, Google revealed that Postini’s technology is integrated in Google Apps Premier Edition.

Thanks to this move, the customers of Google Apps Premier Edition will be able to set configurable spam and viruses filtering that are customized for the nature of the business and manage all outbound content policy, including adding footers to every message based on business policy rules, blocking messages with specific keywords or attachments.

But the integration of Postini technology will be also a big improvement for administrators who will have the option of visibility into all email within their organization for the purposes of compliance.
Also from now on, the users will have access to the possibility to restore the messages that were deleted by mistake.  

Beside the security improvements Google announced two new features for its Google Apps Premier Edition: a new email routing feature and an increase in storage from 10 GB to 25 GB.
Also the Postini’s customers will have access to a free extended trial of Google Apps Premier Edition, until June 30 2008.

Google said that the Postini technology is already available in the English-language version of Apps Premier and during next month it will be integrated in the international version, available in 27 languages.

Google Apps has been available as a free service since August 2006 and it includes the large storage-capacity service Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and the Start Page feature for creating a customizable home page on a specific domain. Last month Google has added Google Presentations into Google Apps.

Google Apps Premier Edition, the business version of Google Apps, was unveiled in February this year and it offers over the free version APIs for business integration, 99.9 % uptime, 24x7 support for critical issues and advertising is optional. The price of the service is $50 per user account per year.

According to Google, Google Apps Premier Edition was already adopted by more than 100,000 businesses. 

Google Apps is considered by some analysts as a threat for to Microsoft’s flagship Office productivity software.

Earlier this week, in an announcement seen as a reaction to Google Apps, Microsoft announced Microsoft's Office Live Workspace, a web service which allows users to save more than 1,000 Office documents to one place online, access them through the Web, and hare the documents with others in a password- protected, invitation-only online workspace.