My Experience with Google Apps
Today Google announced a new version Google Apps named Google Apps Premier Edition. Although I subscribe to the regular version currently I may switch to the Premier Edition since I now run a business.
My experience with Google Apps has been extremely positive. I love being able to separate my personal life from my business life while still using the Google’s great tools. While GMail is my favorite feature the other features are nothing to sneer at.
From a business perspective Google Apps just makes sense, especially if you run a small business. For email you used to register a domain, buy hosting, setup a mail server and bought/downloaded an email client. This was such a hassle, at least I always thought so. I want to spend my time performing tasks that make me money, not System Admin tasks that don’t. And that was for email, but what about other office tasks such as documents and spreadsheets?
For other office tasks, Google Docs is a nice solution although I don’t feel that it is truly ready for the enterprise yet. Don’t get me wrong, Google Docs is great for simple documents and spreadsheets but it does have its problems, all of which have been noted numerous times around the Internet. But when it comes to document sharing, Google does a great job! I’ve used it for a project (Shasradio) I’ve been working on and I plan on using for my consulting business.
Overall Google Apps is another great product from Google. I just have one piece of advice - remember to backup all of your information! Although Google promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee I don’t see any mention of a data guarantee.
Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50/year/user and provides a host of features, including an API. This has not been a paid advertisement, I just want to spread the Google Love.