Tag Archives: Google Apps

There are three good options for small businesses wanting to store and share documents in on the Internet in the cloud: Dropbox, Google Apps, and Microsoft’s Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive.

Dropbox

Simplify your business and boost productivity with the freedom to use the same tools you work with daily. This means you don’t have to switch the programs you use, you just have to switch where you save and open your documents.

You can share Word documents, Powerpoint slides, and large files easily and securely with colleagues and/or clients. Collaborate across the hall or around the globe and get more work done on the go because your files are always available from Dropbox.

Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. It even works when you’re offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection. Watch your changes synced instantly across shared folders.

With easy setup and control you can get started in minutes. Put Dropbox for your business on a single invoice for all of your employees and manage and migrate accounts with admin controls. If someone leaves, you can simply change their permissions online and if someone needs more space, use the admin panel to add more.

This is the same service trusted by tens of millions of personal users that’s now available for businesses. Enjoy dedicated phone support, bank grade AES-256 bit encryption, and unlimited version history for all your files. This means that you can view previous versions of your files if you need it.

Plans start at $795 for 5 users, but before you balk at the price think about all of the other hardware and software this one service is replacing. There are no more USB flash drives, external USB backups, taking backups to an off-site location, managing grandfather schemes to keep revisions, or buying expensive file servers. There is one more login account that users will have to manage, but that’s a minor inconvenience for what you’re getting.

Google Apps

Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps are more than just cloud storage, but they can do that too.

Google Apps requires no hardware or software and needs minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses. Google allows email clients like Microsoft Outlook to have POP or IMAP access to email, contacts and calendar so the transition can even be seamless to your employees.

Each employee gets 25 GB for email storage, so they can keep important messages and find them instantly with built-in Google search. This is higher than what personal Google Mail users get, which is hovering around 8 GB right now. Google Docs lets you store documents in the cloud in a Dropbox-like way, but only 1 GB of storage is included with the plan. More storage can be added as needed for a nominal fee.

Gmail is designed so employees can spend less time managing their inboxes, and more time being productive. Time-saving features like message threading, message labels, fast message search and powerful spam filtering help employees work efficiently with high volumes of email. It’s spam protection is one of the primary reasons we recommend Google Apps for business.

With several options for accessing their information while on the go, employees can be productive with Google Apps even when they’re not at their desks. At no extra charge, Google Apps supports over-the-air mobile access on BlackBerry devices, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android and many less powerful phones.

With synchronous replication, your data and activity in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites is simultaneously preserved in multiple secure data centers. If one data center is unable to serve your requests, the system is designed to instantly fall back to another data center that can serve your account with no interruption in service.

Integration options let you connect Google Apps to your existing IT infrastructure if you’re business is already on a domain and support options include: phone support for critical issues, email support, and self-service online support. Plans start at $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year.

Microsoft Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive

Office 365

For those who want the familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud, Office 365 is the ideal solution. Everyone can work together easily with anywhere access to email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. It includes business-class security and is backed by Microsoft. Whether you are a small business or multinational enterprise, Office 365 offers plans designed to fit your organization’s unique needs.

Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses is $6 per user per month subscription that lets your employees access email, documents, contacts, and calendar from virtually anywhere on almost any device. This plan is ideal for organizations with fewer than 25 employees that do not have IT staff or expertise. Compare Office 365 to Google Apps for Business.

Docs for Facebook

Built using Microsoft Office 2010, Docs for Facebook provides the best possible document service for the Facebook environment. Seamless integration with Facebook means that the service is all about sharing your documents. Docs enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know. Docs uses the Facebook login and is intended for personal use, but can be used for business if it suits your needs.

Windows Live SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive is a free cloud storage service that allows users to upload files to Internet file storage and then access them from a Web browser. It is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live range of online services, and uses Windows Live ID to control access to files, allowing users to keep the files private, share them with contacts, or make the files public. Publicly-shared files do not require a Windows Live ID to access. The service offers 25 GB of free personal storage, with individual files limited to 100 MB. Compare this service to Dropbox for Teams.

Watershawl Technology Consulting

If you need help choosing or deploying any of these solutions at your business, contact Indianapolis Technology Consultants, Watershawl, Inc. We serve the Greater Indianapolis area, but travel all over the state of Indiana helping small business owners get more out of their technology.

If you have an Android phone and you use Gmail, you’re in luck. There are plenty of apps for you to choose from that work great, but if you’re a Google Apps email user, the setup is a bit more tricky with most apps because there are currently no specific Android apps for Google App users.

What’s the difference between a Gmail account and a Google Apps account if the email looks the same in a browser?

Google Apps users may have noticed that things are a little different than Gmail. While the mail interface is now the same, that hasn’t always been the case and you can’t login to your Google Apps account through your Gmail address, although there are options, which I’ll discuss later. While a Google App email address can become a Google account or be linked to an existing Google account, a gmail account can’t be used to access a Google Apps account directly.

So what are my options?

First, if you are checking your Google Apps email from Outlook or Thunderbird because that’s how you or your IT department or vendor set it up for you, great. You’ll probably need them to help you set it up on your Android phone as well. This really isn’t for you. But if you check it in a browser or on your Android mobile device already, you are who this article is for. Google provides several web addresses to login to your Google Apps email even if you don’t have a custom domain setup for it such as mail.yourcustomdomain.com. Try placing your domain name after the a/ in http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainnamehere. Adding a ‘s’ to http makes it secure. Google will change it to https anyway because that is the new default. If you browse here on your mobile phone, chances are Google will redirect you to the mobile version. This is your best option if you want to view pictures in your email. The default Android email app with Sprint’s HTC Hero, which is what we use, does not display pictures in email because it does not support HTML email.

So what is the best Android email app for Google Apps email users?

If you want to see pictures in your email, use an HTML email viewer, of which there are few. This is because Google has had an inline image/html email problem with Android since 2008. MailDroid is said to have success with viewing images, but Google says that the best way is to browse to http://www.google.com/m/a/example.com where example.com is your domain. If you have a T-Mobile G1, then you have pre-installed programs for Google Apps, but otherwise, you’re out of luck and the browser is the best alternative. The only downside to using a browser is there is no push email; there is no alerts when new email is received. This means that you’re stuck constantly checking your email through the browser or not getting inline images or HTML email through your default Android app.

The solution? Use your default Android email app for push email and syncing, but keep an icon to the web address in the browser for viewing inline images (attached images can be downloaded and viewed just fine). This is the work around until Android and it’s apps develop a little further. Remember, it’s new here.

If you or your business needs help or support with Google Apps, please contact us and we’d be happy to consult you.

Ether Fleet’s Cloud Computing recently answered a couple of the most asked questions about cloud computing.

A lot of people ask, “Is Google Docs Cloud Computing?” and they do a good job of answering that while Google Docs runs web-based apps such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and forms Google Docs itself is not could computing.

The other popular question, “Is Windows Live Cloud Computing?” is very similar, with the difference being that some Windows Live applications are local desktop apps for the PC.

Ether Fleet is a good resource for cloud computing news.

When business owners ask me what they can do about all the spam they’re getting, I recommend Google Apps. Not only does Gmail stop most of the spam they’ll get, but it also allows them to create email addresses for all of their employees, setup distribution groups, and access their email from anywhere, including their mobile devices.

But while spam might be the reason to switch to Google Apps, Gmail is not the only benefit. Your company will also get shared calendar, contacts, documents, and an internal website which you can use as a wiki or as a CRM. And if the tools Google Apps provides by default aren’t enough for you, there are hundreds of add-on software packages for project management, accounting, and customer relationship management that make Google Apps one of the most compelling tools for business owners today.

Watershawl has helped many businesses switch over from their standard POP accounts to the enterprise-level services that Google Apps provides. If you’re looking to reduce spam in your email and communicate more effectively with your employees and your customers, Google Apps may be right for you.

Google Maps

If your website is for a local business, you might want to consider integrating it with Google Maps. Google Maps uses query string parameters to pass information to the servers to change the information you see on the webpage. For example, you could have a map show directions to your business from wherever the browser is located, by gathering the information and passing it on to Google.

Google Apps

It’s out of beta and you need not be scared of the cloud anymore. While you still may want to have local backups, Google Apps is a great alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. But for those who still want to use Outlook, the beauty of it all is that you still can because Google Apps has POP access.  It even has IMAP access for use with Blackberrys.  Google Docs is a great feature too, but is not as robust as Microsoft Office.

Google AdWords

If you are tired of waiting for SEO to kick in, Google AdWords is a great way to get your website to the top of the pile nearly instantly. You’ll pay money up front, but the goal is to get more visitors – which you will do – so be prepared by having a website that is optimized for conversions, gets to the point right away, and clearly directs the user to the action you want them to take. Once that is in place, AdWords can only help.

One of our clients wanted all of their staff to have email access through Microsoft Outlook on each PC, but they didn’t have the need for a Microsoft Exchange server.  Instead, we configured their domain to install Google Apps, created email accounts and distribution groups for the staff members, then configured Microsoft Outlook on each staff member’s PC to allow them to have access.

“The difference between Exchange and Google Apps is transparent to the user, ” said Erich Stauffer, Business Consultant at Watershawl, Inc.  “They don’t know and they don’t care – as long as it works.”  And it usually does.  Google Apps sports a 5-nine’s uptime which means they are up 99.999% of the year.  This means they can statistically be down for up to 8 hours a year, but uptime is significantly higher with Google than with your own standalone Exchange server.

However, cloud computing like this is not for every customer.  Some would not be able to keep secure data on remote servers and Microsoft Exchange does offer the ability to keep all email stored locally, but even so, only the email kept internally stays secure.  Once it leaves your organization, unless the email is encrypted, it is prone to eavesdropping.  Another reason for an Exchange server would be for backup’s, but with Outlook, you can download Google Apps mail as a PST, then store the PST as your back-up.

What unique, money-saving technology can Watershawl help you with today?