This is one of the newest and most useful features offered by Google. Google Apps for Your Domain, or just Apps, is a service that allows you to use a personalized version of Gmail, Google’s email service, as your organizations email. But wait, there’s a lot more to Apps than just email. Apps features the following services:
1. Gmail – This is a personalized version of regular Gmail. The basic (free) account currently features more than 6 gigabytes of storage space per user, more than you or any of your employees will every use. The amount of space grows every second, so it is highly unlikely that you will ever run out of storage space. If you choose to upgrade to the paid version, you get a static 25 gigabytes of space. This upgraded version has a yearly fee of $50 per user.
2. Google Talk – Google Talk is an instant messenger program. When implemented in Apps, it allows you to communicate with your entire organization online. This is a great feature for remote employees or simply an alternative to sending an email.
3. Google Calendar – Calendar for Apps is a full function version of the standard Google Calendar. This allows you to share you calendar with all employees, subscribe to multiple calendars, and create organizational calendars that contain important events for the whole organization.
4. Google Documents – Not only does this feature an online word processing program, but also an online spreadsheet service and presentation service. If you currently use Microsoft Office, the interface will be very familiar to you. While there are a few missing features, the overall design of this service is amazing. You can create documents online, share them with colleagues and others, and save them as Word or Adobe PDF files. Most useful is that you have access to these documents anywhere you have an internet connection. You never have to worry about being without your documents and information again.
5. Google Sites – This is a brand new feature to Apps. This is a great feature for a startup non-profit with no IT budget and no web design capability. However, since Sites is a very scalable service, it is appropriate for use by even the largest organizations. Using Sites, you can create websites for internal use and for public use. Internal sites are only accessible to your employees and can be used for unique projects or to share files. You can integrate other Google features, such as YouTube, Picasa, and Google Calendar.
You simply cannot beat the features of Apps. There are other services such as Zoho that combine all these functions, but Google Apps is the most straightforward, feature-rich, and established product out there.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5bccb28a-2e23-46bc-ade0-eca3e15e3508)
