Google Apps for your domain
Google Apps are collaboration tools that are custom delivered for your business domain. No requirements to host your own email, you simply access the collaborative applications in a secure environment online.
When your running Google domain apps for your business, collaboration is simple with colleagues, business partners & customers outside of your domain.
There seems to be a better way of collaborating in business today, it happens to be Google Apps!
Google Apps in 2 minutes:
What are the apps included with Google's business offering:
Gmail
From a user prospective...
With Gmail you never have to worry about your mail quota. No longer do you need to delete email to fall below your email quota! Gmail also includes Google search across all your email, it's really simple to find old email & fast. With features like labels, message threading & integrated text, voice & video chat, you can get alot done, faster.
From a IT prospective...
Gmail eliminates demands on your IT department, and allows your team to focus on more productive tasks. It includes 25GB of storage per user, so no more unnecessary calls, or budgeting to add more storage. With your email now hosted with Google's secure, highly reliable infrastructure, you can can drastically reduce your overall operating costs.
Google Calendar
From a user prospective...
Trying to find a time when a group of co-workers are all free? Check the box next to each co-worker's name, see each calendar appear alongside your own, and scan for the empty space. No more guessing only to find out that people have existing conflicts. Google Calendar is accessible from any computer with a browser and is available from many different mobile phones, so you can manage your schedule from anywhere.
From an IT prospective...
If your employees' computers can run a browser, then they can run Google Calendar. Google Calendar makes group calendaring easy with resource scheduling, shared calendars, integration with Microsoft Outlook™ and support for easy mobile access.
Google Sites
From a user prospective...
You want IT to build a project management repository for you, but it's asking for a cost/benefit justification for the thousands of dollars of hardware and software that would be required. So instead you fall back to taking notes on a whiteboard or paper, only to find them erased, misplaced or just hard to search and share with colleagues. Google Sites allows you to maintain information online – meeting notes, project plans, partners portals and more. None of this requires any additional IT support and it's as easy as creating a document. Information in your sites is always available and searchable to easily reference in the future.
From an IT prospective...
Technology can foster user collaboration and innovation. Unfortunately, users often don't understand that deploying collaboration technology typically needs to be done in a clearly architected way to ensure the infrastructure will meet their performance demands. But Google Sites is different, because it's hosted in Google's data centers and requires no new infrastructure. And when employees want to invite new collaborators to their project site, you don't need to worry about getting more client access licenses. And you can choose to invite anyone with an email account to view or collaborate with you.
Google Docs
From a user perspective...
What sounds better? Creating a spreadsheet, emailing it to several coworkers for their feedback and spending hours rebuilding the master spreadsheet, or creating your spreadsheet, sharing it as an online Google Doc and allowing co-workers to contribute their edits directly to the master document without you having to reconcile their changes? The time you save by not hassling with attachments or having to deal with multiple copies of the same file lets you get to the priorities that you never had time for before.
From an IT perspective...
It's a money-saving best practice to purchase licenses of Microsoft Project™ or Visio™ only for those users who need it, so why do you purchase the entire Microsoft Office™ suite for each user who may only need to create or read a Word™ document or Excel™ spreadsheet? Finance and Legal may need the advanced features of Office, but the majority of employees can do their jobs with Google Docs – which includes documents, spreadsheets and presentations – saving you the cost of expensive Office licenses for them.
Google Talk
From a user prospective...
Email conversations sometimes are just too slow. Why wait several hours for a response you can get in ten seconds? With Google Talk you can chat right from your inbox. Including video and audio chat. Google Talk users can see their colleagues' status (online, busy, offline), allowing them to send a chat when you need a quick answer, they can even chat as a reply to an email message. And it's easy to connect with your co-workers, because their IM accounts are connected to their business email accounts.
From an IT prospective...
Instant messaging is difficult to justify from a cost perspective as a mission critical business tool. Besides, there are free IM clients to choose from, although this does add the concern of people using unsanctioned software within your environment. With Google Apps, IM is embedded directly within the suite with no additional hardware or software requirements. It's all under the umbrella of your secure corporate communication platform.