Google Apps for your domain
Recently, I started hearing many people talk about Google Apps for your domain . I even heard about a 200 employee company consider switching to it. Well, I decided to try it out and found it’s really amazing. I am surprised that Google is able to offer all the included services for free. Google Apps includes 6 main things at this point: mail, calendar, chat, docs and spreadsheets, launch page and site builder. I set it up for a domain last week to try it out.
The mail is basically a full Gmail account just with your own domain on it. You still get the 2 gigs of storage per mailbox and a great spam filter. (Did I mention they bought Postini.) You also get the ability to link up each mailbox with other email addresses from other domains. Plus, you can configure it to pull in mail from up to 5 other accounts via POP. All of these features are standard for a gmail account, it is just nice to setup your own domain with all those features but without the headaches of management. The only thing I noticed different from a standard Gmail account is that it automatically adds all users on that domain into your contacts.
I really had not spent any time with Docs and Spreadsheets until I played with Google Apps. It is really pretty nice for standard word processing and small basic spreadsheets. Both apps seems a little slow compared to a it’s desktop application equivalent but still very usable. They built many ways to import your docs into the system and many export options. I noticed in the Docs and Spreadsheets section there are different access level settings for people inside your domain and outside your domain. I believe all the rest of the main sections are the same as with normal Google accounts just with some extra integration added in for your domain.
I have not spent any considerable amount on time with the calendar, chat, launch page or site builder. The only thing that I really feel is missing is a spot for some non-public content. I would call it something like an Intranet. A place for all employees to post information about their business without making it public to the world. It is possible that Google already provides this service but I couldn’t find it.
Now all these features do come at a price. The price is ads and your privacy. Google has a stated policy that they keep all pieces of information about you so they can improve their services. I know they stated they run all search data through an anonymizer after 18 months to 2 years. So they are collecting lots of information about you, especially as you use them for more and more services. It really comes down to the fact that the more they know about you, the better ads they can serve.
They also have an enterprise version which gives you some extra features. You get 10 gigs of storage and resources reservation for calendaring. It costs $50 per user per year. I believe if small businesses are looking for an easy solution, this should really consider one of the Google Apps offerings as an option.
August 20th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
The Google Apps for your Domain has to be the most ideal set of web applications any web 2.0 type start up business would need. We at RawVoice use it extensively. We are still using the free standard edition but we may soon switch to the Premier Edition. We had a situation where one of the partners deleted all of the financial E-mail when he resigned. Now that Google owns Postini, we are hoping they offer the E-mail backup service at a significant discount when combined with the $50 per year fee.
Before we started using Google Apps, we were using Groove in order to synchronize our documents and spreadsheets and we had to manage our own Qmail E-mail server. Since we also use our server for web hosting, moving the E-mail off of that server was a no brainer. Once Google added the Writely service to Google Spreadsheets (now known as Google Docs), we quickly made the transition to Google Docs. I can’t explain how frustrating Groove was, I am just glad I don’t have to use it anymore.
I am not sure if Google is using Qmail or not, but Gmail uses the same Qmail features. One of the most useful feature is the login+string. With Gmail and Qmail, you can take your login portion of your E-mail address and add a “+anything” to it. e.g. login+mailinglist1@gmail.com for signing up to mailing lists that you are afraid may end up sending you SPAM. It is quite useful, even for advertising campaigns or other E-mail tracking.