While I was browsing the Google’s services page a few months ago I stumbled upon an awesome tool for small organizations all the way up to large corporations. Most people are familiar with Google’s applications services that include things like GTalk, Docs & Spreadsheets, Reader, Calendar and many more. These services are amazing because they are all in one place and very easily accessible.
One of the best things to do with these tools is to use them for collaboration on projects. For example: if I create a document, I can easily share it to other people that have Google accounts so we can work together and finish a document. This is great for businesses so that people can quickly work together to finish projects. Another thing that can be done is a group can chat at the same time using GTalk’s VOIP technology. There are pretty much infinite uses for all of Google’s services.
Businesses use more traditional methods for all these tools such as Microsoft Office for document creation and Microsoft Exchange Server for email and collaboration tools. These features are all quite expensive and most startups or nonprofit’s find it pretty difficult to have to purchase all this software.
An alternative for this is that a company or organization could use Google’s applications to do most of the tasks of collaboration for the great price of FREE! Google has released a service that organizations can utilize to create their own groups that they can use just for themselves. www.google.com/a has the details but essentially what you can do is sign up for an account which allows you to administer your organization and it gives you the ability to add users so that they can be under the group and use collaboration tools such as calendar and GTalk. The other really neat thing that can be done is that a person can purchase a domain name relatively inexpensively and be able to set the email to work with Google’s Gmail interface. I love this because then a user can login to one place which can be a custom URL that is setup for your domain name and they can access all these services and it is cordoned off so that only the users that are in the organization have access.
For example, I have adambeardmore.com’s email going to Google’s application service so that I can have email through Google. So instead of having to worry about a server going down or problems with my hosting company’s mail system, Google takes care of this and all data is safely hosted in their data centers. It takes a load off a tech because these critical services are already taken care of so they can concentrate on other things in the organization.
The process of setting this all up is relatively simple and Google’s site has a great step by step walk-through that contains instructions for several different scenarios of setting this system up.
I highly recommend this system to anyone who needs to get a small business or organization up and running quickly and if they don’t have enough capital to purchase all the expensive collaboration software right away. I have only scratched the surface of the power of the system. You really have to check it out yourself to see all the amazing things that can be done with this tool.
Check it out today at www.google.com/a
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