Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Anyone who knows me knows that I love many Google Products - I use Gmail extensively and follow their product releases closely. I wanted to write about how you can use many of these Google products to build your business with the Google Apps suite.

Setting up Google Apps

Google Apps is a service that combines many products into a single suite for business and organizations with a focus on collaboration and communication. It allows a company to set up a web presence or Intranet that is hosted on Google's servers and assign an account to each employee or member. These accounts are all tied together, so users can easily e-mail, chat and collaborate with one another.

There are two versions of Google Apps - Standard and Premier. The Standard version is free and packages together all the Google products for up to 50 users. Google subsidizes this service by placing ads within the applications, similar to the way Gmail currently works for regular users.

The premium version has a per-user charge with no maximum account limit and is hosted on separate servers with guaranteed uptime. The premium version comes packaged with some compliance and security tools that can be important for larger organizations and allows for full access for programmers via Google's extensive APIs (application programming interfaces).

To join Google Apps you can purchase a new domain (www.mycompany.com). If you already own the domain and you have full DNS-level access, you can make Google Apps work as well. Once you have registered, you can build your company website and assign accounts and e-mail addresses to your users (user@mycompany.com).

It's amazing that Google provides these services to organizations for free - I was able to set up my organization with 3 accounts within 20 minutes, and when I logged into my Gmail within Google Apps, I could immediately see the other two members of my organization within the Google Chat sidebar.

Links:

• Google Apps for Business
• Google Apps Editions

Using Shared Google Calendar, Talk and Gmail

Google Apps comes with the following applications:

• Full featured Gmail account for every user
• Calendar - Each user has their own calender that can be shared, and can see the company calendar
• Google Chat - A built-in instant messaging tool
• Google Docs - Use the online word processing and spreadsheet tools for collaborating and sharing
• Google Sites - Create an wiki for knowledge management
• Google Pages - Maintain a set of web pages for your organization
• Contact - Organize your contacts and their groups

SalesForce integration is also available at an additional cost.

One benefit of signing up your employees or organization members within a single Google Apps installation is that all the accounts are connected. All users can see their company calendar, and collaboration is easy.

All the applications are also available on mobile phones, and the e-mail, contacts and calendar can all be synchronized with desktop programs like Outlook if preferable. Gmail supports POP and IMAP e-mail protocols and allows all e-mails to be forwarded to a different account or be pulled from other mail servers into Gmail.

Using Google Docs

Google Docs is an amazing product. It is much like Microsoft Office, except that it is all hosted by Google and documents are all available online. When you are working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations, you can share them with other users. In fact, this article was originally written within Google Docs, and shared with other users for review. Many users can work on the document at the same time, and all changes are recorded.

Some features of Google Docs include:

• Share and collaborate - documents are stored online so you don't have to worry about multiple copies
• Security and access control - You can decide who can view or edit your documents.
• Revision control - All changes are recorded and can be reviewed
• Notification - Supports email notification when a document has been edited

Google has also recently added a full presentation tool (like Microsoft PowerPoint) and a form builder that allows you to send surveys and have results compiled automatically into a spreadsheet.

There are many competing products that are similar to Google Docs - a few of the major competitors are listed below for reference.

Links:

• Google Docs
• Zoho online office suite
  
• ThinkFree office