I talk a lot about simplifying your spending in order to make things easier for yourself, and a while back I did the same thing with my online life in general. I used to use Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar, Office for documents and my local hard drive for all my important docs. When I bought my laptop I found it frustrating to have 2 different computers both with various things on them, making it difficult for me to really have the flexibility I wanted. So I made the (somewhat difficult) switch to using Gmail as my primary email and calendar source, Google Docs for high-use documents, and some external hard drives to easily store and backup all my local files. That way, regardless of which computer I was using I had access to everything in a central location. Better yet, all of my email and often used documents were available to me from anywhere that had internet access! Awesome, yes. A little scary, definitely.
The same concept applies to Google’s “internet/business suite” Google Apps. I’ve been trying out the free standard version of Google Apps for a while now, and I wanted to provide a review of my experiences. First of all, what does Google Apps provide? Well, it’s basically a full suite of tools that you can use to manage a business network within Google’s applications. It allows you to set up users, email through Gmail (with your domain), calendars, web pages, documents, a common start page, Google Talk, among various other things.
For being a free service, Google Apps provides a lot of functionality. For an internet entrepreneur it can be extremely useful, and being that everything is web based it provides the opportunity to have a truly mobile workforce. Instead of logging into a company computer with a bunch of necessary software packages, most of your day to day business functions can be taken care of by logging into your Google Apps domain from your favorite browser. Here are some of the cool parts about the service.
It’s Google Apps, but it’s on your own domain
The application runs on Google, but you can integrate into your own domain. As long as you have a host that allows you enough freedom to change your domain’s MX and CNAME records (I use Vita Hosting for mine) you can integrate your domain into Google Apps, and it makes for a nice way to use Google tools in conjuntion with your business without having to totally abandon your brand.
Domain email within Gmail
Being able to use Gmail with your own domain email addresses is a great feature. If you’re used to the Gmail interface, it’s a big win to be able to utilize all of the security, spam filtering, contacts, and other tools that Gmail provides without having to manage (or hire someone to manage) it yourself. Every user account gets the traditional amount of space that regular GMail accounts do with the free version of Google Apps.
Common Start Page for all users
Google Apps also allows each user to have a common iGoogle-esque start page (with your own custom business logos!), which you can standardized. That way each user can have a standard set of links or gadgets that are used by everyone. You can lock those items so that there is some level of standardization for all your users.
Customizable Start Page
While you can lock some items of the start page, you’re also allowed to leave some parts of the page customizable so each user can add certain things that are useful for them throughout their normal day. Being that it’s based on Google Gadgets, you also have the ability to make additional Gadgets for your own business needs!
Overall, I’ve been pretty pleased with the ease of use of Google Apps. Being that most of my business interests are web-based, having a web-based business portal with links to all my important sites has been great. Having all that information (including email, docs, and calendar) in one place allows me to basically have a mobile office worldwide.
Join us tomorrow for Part 2 where I’ll talk about some things that could be improved with Google Apps, along with more details of the Premier Edition.
