Google apps for domains for small businesses
It’s been no secret that for quite a while now google have been offering their applications for domains, yet it’s surprising how many people I speak to haven’t implemented it in their business because they don’t quite see the point, or the relevance, or how easy it is…
The Standard Edition (read: free) allows for up to 50 e-mail accounts to be registered against your top-level domain (.com / .co.uk etc) – which is pretty much in keeping with my idea of a small business – if you want more, you have to pay more (at time of writing £33.00 per user/year). The Standard Edition allows for all the usual things that you’d expect: e-mail (in the much-loved “gmail” interface); docs (for online storage and sharing of letters, spreadsheets etc); calendars (shared and individual); sites (to allow for small websites to be created) and even chat (although as of yet I’ve not found much use for this).
What’s even better is that you can do almost all of it using any hosting company / domain name provider – as long as you have access to your DNS records (which 99% of them allow these days), even a cut-back service like 123-reg (which is actually my favourite supplier) allows you to directly manipulate your DNS records with them).
It has to be said though, one of my favourite features is part of the “google mail for your domain” application: Exchange-like behaviour! You can add your google mail accounts to smartphones and the like and it will act just like an exchange server, allowing you to get push e-mail, contacts and calendar entries straight to your phone – this is something that larger businesses usually have to pay quite a lot for by investing in a package as overwhelming as Blackberry Enterprise Server.
If you have a smaller business and you’ve got some nice new iPhones or some other sort of smartphone, let your users push their work e-mail, contacts and calendar – it’s a bit of fun and ultimately it’s likely to increase their productivity anyway because it’ll allow them to answer quick e-mails while out of the office. Best of all you don’t have to worry about buying expensive Exchange installations or even having to worry about your e-mail server being in-house (no-one wants to come into the office at 5am on a Sunday to reboot the broken e-mail server).
In the last week I’ve done three translations from pop3-based implementations to google apps for domains and all have been successful (more impressively I’ve got my transfer time down to about an hour now!)
Google apps standard edition: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
Update, October 2011: The “free” google apps edition now only supports up to 10 users, but still works just fine!