Email & Web-Based Tools from Google

Posted by Michelle Harrington on Jul 8th, 2009

I recently helped a client configure their domain-based email accounts to use Gmail instead of their website host email service.  The client preferred to use Gmail (as many of their employees were already familiar with it from using it for their personal accounts) and the client liked the ability to manage their email user accounts in one easy-to-use control panel.

With a bit of configuration on the server side and some set up within  Google “Apps” business account, we were able to point the  email to Google’s servers and they are now using that service for all of their  email accounts.

Some of the benefits of using Gmail’s email service is their 99.9% uptime guarantee, hugh storage limits, a full-featured and  user-friendly email interface and the ability to sync with Outlook if desired.  Another benefit is having online access to your inbox, including historical emails and folders.  Google “Apps” offers a Free Standard Edition which is limited to 50 user accounts and a fee-based Premium Edition.

To learn more about Google “Apps” including web “apps” for Gmail, calendar, instant messaging (IM), documents, spreadsheets, presentations, sites and video – which help businesses and organizations improve collaboration and productivity go to:  Google Apps.

If you’d like to watch a short video on the highlights of using GMail for your domain-based email accounts, click here.

The only downside I can see is that Google uses Gmail to serve up text ads in the sidebar when you click into an  email message.  The ads aren’t obnoxiously large or  “in the way”, but they might “creep” you out at first, because you’ll find the ads relevant to the subject matter of the messages in your inbox.  For some people, that’s just too invasive.  For the rest, the benefits of this free, full-featured application hosted on Google’s infrastructure seems like a solid choice.

While I haven’t used Google Business “Apps” myself,  I do use Gmail for a personal email account and have found it to be very user-friendly.  If you are considering using Google “Apps”/Gmail for your business or organization you might want to try out Gmail for a personal account first, just to give it a “test drive”.

To sign up for Google “Apps” for your business or organization, click here.

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Author | Michelle Harrington of Emagine Web Marketing
Michelle is a web development and internet marketing professional dedicated to helping small businesses in Hawaii achieve success online. Michelle provides free advice, tips and how to's on the Small Business Internet Marketing Blog.

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