Why You Should Use Google Apps for Your Small Business

20 November 2009

In the course of operating Open End, I get to meet with and learn about all sorts of small businesses and organizations.  While we’re typically sitting down to discuss websites, I often get a glimpse at back-end operations — and frequently find myself sympathetically shaking my head when I realize how much time, effort, money and frustration have been endured just in getting email up and running for 2, 10 or 20 people.

So here’s my advice.  Forget Microsoft Exchange.  Forget paying for email (or calendar) hosting, period.  Maybe even forget about Microsoft Office.  Just sign up for a free Google Apps account and stop thinking about this stuff altogether.

Google Apps is awesome, it runs at your domain, and it just works.  A lot of you already have Gmail accounts.  If you do, you may have noticed when you log into Gmail that there are links at the top of your screen for Calendar and Documents.  The idea with Google Apps is that it gives you these exact same tools — Gmail, Calendar and Documents — except it lets you run them at your own domain name, and share items (events and documents) with your coworkers.

Why Google Apps is great for email:

1. As I mentioned above, it’s free.  I’m amazed at how many people and organizations pay for email hosting.  Not only that, but a lot of organizations go above and beyond standard email hosting and pay a much heftier fee for Microsoft Exchange.  Stop it.  You almost certainly don’t need it.
2. Also as I mentioned above, it’s Gmail — but using your own domain.  A lot of people don’t realize this.  For example, I use Google Apps for openendstudios.com — whenever you get an email from me, it says “clay@openendstudios.com” — not clay@gmail.com or @googleapps.com or anything else.  Google Apps is transparent.
3. There’s nothing to support and nothing to install.  Just create your account and go.  Google pretty much knows what they’re doing — you’re very rarely going to deal with any server downtime.
4. It works across all your devices, and it’s always in sync.  Whether you’re checking your email in your web browser, using an email app (like Outlook or Apple Mail), on your iPhone, or on your Blackberry, or any combination of those, your email will always be in sync, thanks to IMAP support.

And Google Apps isn’t just about email.  If you have any need for one or more shared calendars in your office, it solves that problem with Google Calendar.  Like any Google App, you can access it through the web browser, or also through stand-alone applications.  (In the case of Calendar, you can tie things into apps like Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook.)  Like everything else with Google Apps, it syncs seemlessly, so you and your coworkers all see the same stuff, no matter how you’re accessing the data.

And if you find yourself spending a lot of cash on Microsoft Word and Excel licenses for all of your employees, Google Apps has a solution for that, too:  Google Docs.  Google Docs is amazingly good web-based software for working with documents, spreadsheets, and even presentations.  Instead of emailing documents back and forth all the time, you just “share” documents with your coworkers.  It’s all run through docs.(yourdomain).com.  If you need to share a document with a coworker, you just specify that right within the document — the next time that person logs in, they’ll see that document listed.  If you need to send a document off to a business associate, Google Docs lets you save any document to your desktop in a number of formats, including Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF.  (You can even import .doc and .xls files that other people send you.)

So if you’re spending any money on email hosting, calendar hosting, or Microsoft Office, just know that you have an alternative that’s not only free, but actually provides a superior experience in many ways.  Take a look and see if it’s for you.