Google Apps: Powerful Solutions At Low Cost

Google Apps come with a variety of tools to help centralize and organize any business or family. With tools that provide email, calendar, start page, chat, docs (online documents), and webpages; it seems Google Apps is providing a structure where organization is seamless and instantaneous. There are no upgrade and licensing restrictions to worry about anymore. There are currently 3 editions of Google Apps; Standard Edition; Premier Edition, and Education Edition.

The Standard edition is available to anyone with a Gmail account. If you do not already have one, you can sign up here. With that, you can utilize Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page. Google Talk is also now integrated with AIM as long as you are using it through your web browser. This option can be utilized by several family members to stay in touch, plan and organize events together.

The Premier Edition is recommended for small companies everywhere. It is the easiest and most cost effective method to getting your business operable in no time. At $50 per user, per year, you can stream line calendar, email, website, messaging services, and most of your documents. All this can be accessed from your “Start Page”, where employees can have a single login to all of Google’s features, and one page to find everything they need to start their day in seconds. It also comes with a Control panel to manage your domain and user accounts, Extensibility API’s so you can integrate their applications with existing systems or 3^rd party systems, Security and compliance that manages your policies and message recovery, and Online trouble shooting and extended phone hours support for critical issues. In case you thought that was it, they also include 25 gigs of online storage space per user.

The Education Edition is no different that the Premier Edition in terms of services available, although you are only allotted the amount of space Gmail currently allows access to. The only other major difference is unless you are a student and/or full time nonprofit staff, you may not have the option to turn off text based ads, where in the Premier Edition you have the ability to turn the ads off..

No matter how one examines the options, Google is providing services users needs and want available to them. A great compliment to Google’s Online Apps, is the Sun based Open Office project. Their project contains a wealth of free suite of programs that enable you to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, drawing, and database tools. This can be used locally, with Google’s Online Documents used for collaboration when multiple users have to access one document. No matter how it is portrayed, Google Apps seems to be a service people are finding usable, and a product Google is standing behind and preparing more development for.

Set as favorite

Bookmark

Email This

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry