what do real people use Google Apps for?

[fluiddruid]

@code_grey

what does business edition of Google Apps give to businesses that is worth paying for (and have organizational headache over) rather than telling the employees to get personal accounts?

Is it just the matter of business version being the only one that will synch your Google Calendar with that of your colleagues? Or are there other major features?

At my business, we use Google Apps. We still email from [name]@[ourcompany].com, but the actual email handling is handled by Google, and we use a Gmail interface that is branded with our company name and logo.

This is much, much less expensive than maintaining an Exchange server. As a small company, we don’t have a strong need to buy Office licenses for everyone here anymore either, and it’s super easy to collaborate on Google Docs. Plus, you have access to all your docs anywhere without any special steps, too.

[code_grey]

got it, corporate email without Microsoft Exchange server sounds great. Makes sense

[tellyworth]

@code_grey

Can somebody dispel my ignorance as to what do real paying users actually use this for?

My company has many employees who work from home. We use Google Apps for sharing documents, spreadsheets and calendars. It’s an easy and inexpensive way of doing that.

[Crown_Prince_of_Irony]

I pay $10 to Google every year, but only for my domain name (which is a spin on my last name, and I wanted to register for email use). Otherwise, the Google Apps suite is free to use up to 50 users (and possibly within other constraints). If I already had my own domain name, I’d be able to have Google handle all my email for that domain via the web, and centrally administer all my email users via the GApps dashboard.

I know a couple companies that are using the free edition of Google Apps quite successfully for up to a couple dozen users, and as far as I know, they’re operating within Google’s terms.

[Crown_Prince_of_Irony]

@fluiddruid

At my business, we use Google Apps. We still email from [name]@[ourcompany].com, but the actual email handling is handled by Google, and we use a Gmail interface that is branded with our company name and logo.

This is much, much less expensive than maintaining an Exchange server. As a small company, we don’t have a strong need to buy Office licenses for everyone here anymore either, and it’s super easy to collaborate on Google Docs. Plus, you have access to all your docs anywhere without any special steps, too.

This is a great point - one of the biggest obstacles these days to growing a small company beyond the mom & pop/run out of the garage phase, is the cost of setting up the back office. Email, calendaring, document creation/collaboration, ERP, payroll/HR - all these used to require significant expense, not only for the server/client software licenses, but also for the hardware, and the cost of either hiring an IT management firm, or staffing an IT resource to keep the wheels on.

Google Apps and other cloud-based enterprise services offer companies a pretty scalable alternative (as far as SMB scalability needs go) for minimal setup cost, that can do 80% of what the enterprise software platforms like Exchange, Notes, and Sharepoint can do, with none of the setup costs. As long as your business is fine with 99% uptime instead of 99.999%, you can save a lot of money.