Google Apps - small business application nirvana

Google is universally known for being the go-to search engine when looking for information.  A lesser-known arm of their business is Google Apps, and this article will discuss its components in detail.

Google Apps is a group of applications designed to deliver business class services through the internet.  The applications include Email, Calendar, Contacts, Groups, Docs, Sites, Tasks, Video and Voice.  There's no server hardware required; Google host all of these services on their hardware.  All you need is an internet connection, and a computer or mobile with a browser.

I've been actively using Google Apps for ZXZ Consulting for over 3 years, and have further installed for 2 other clients.  What makes it a brilliant proposition is the overall cost.  In the UK you pay £33 per user per year for the Premier edition.  The Standard edition is free.  I'm going to talk specifically about the Premier edition.

The cost here is important.  Before Apple released the Mac Mini with Snow Leopard Server, most businesses had the choice of Microsoft and their Exchange email server, or for the larger businesses, Lotus Notes.  Both the Microsoft and Lotus messaging solutions required that businesses have their own hardware to run the applications on, and therefore usually an IT function to support it.  The total cost of ownership for a business messaging environment could run into many thousands of pounds, placing this kind of technology out of reach for small businesses.  And along came GMail.

Gmail was born in 2004 and offered 1Gb of mail storage to invited users.  A year later, Google increased the storage amount to 7.5Gb sending internal IT departments into disarray.  At that time server storage was expensive and IT functions were generally restricting email account sizes to between 100Mb and 1Gb.  Having users tell you that they received a better email experience from GMail became a recurring event.  In 2006 Google announced GMail For Your Domain, and soon after Google Apps For Your Domain.  This meant that you could use your own domain name and have access to the Google suite of applications.  The next major step was to introduce Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, meaning users familiar with Outlook and essentially reluctant to move to the web-based interface could sync their Google Apps email to the Outlook application.  Google Apps Mail is the resulting application from this.

The other applications supplement email; Calendar give you and your team a fully customisable calendar with options to make it visible on the internet.  Docs is a space where you can share documents and edit them in real time.  Sites empowers you to create internal websites for teams, or even a full on internet site.  Alongside these you have Chat, Voice and Video, which makes collaboration that much easier.  It means you don't have to use separate applications for chat and video-conferencing; Google Apps has it built in.

While Google does provide exceedingly good value for money, it does make the internet connection even more important.  If a small business migrates to the Google Apps environment, a key thing to ensure is that you have a service level agreement with your ISP so that you'll know response times and fix times should your service be interrupted.  With all the money you've saved, it would be a good idea to have a secondary backup line which activates should the primary fail.

If you're interested in looking at Google Apps for your small business, feel free to get in touch through the Contact page.