It’s finally time for your business to seriously consider Google Apps Premier Edition. For those of you that haven’t researched it, Google Apps is a low-cost, reliable, and secure messaging and collaboration solution. The main feature is the Google Apps mail that utilizes the Gmail interface and seamlessly integrates with Outlook and all mobile devices. Benefits of using Google Apps for your small business are:

• Lower your cost of ownership with messaging solutions. Google Apps is only $50/year per user. Forget about needing an IT guy to consistently manage your servers.
• Retain emails easier with 25GB of email storage per user
• Reliable access with Google’s reliable 99.9% up-time SLA
• Share information easier with their document solutions instead of emailing back and forth
• Feel safer as your email is hosted on Google’s reliable and redundant data centers
• Access your email anywhere with Gmail’s award winning interface, integration with any email program, and access with mobile devices.

The biggest reason I hear of people staying with Microsoft Exchange as an email host is that it integrates your calendar and contacts and makes these easy to share with others. Add to that the ability to administer users and most people don’t want to switch. Google Apps integrates email, calendar, and contacts and gives you the ability to share those with anyone in your company. You can also delegate users and administer all aspects of access and sharing for your employees.

My favorite parts of Google Apps for Small Businesses are:

• Gmail interface for email makes it easy to search and manage email as a primary email program or a secondary online interface to a primary email program like Microsoft Outlook.
• Contacts that synch with everything online and mobile devices
• A fully featured calendar that flat out beats Outlook’s online calendar and provides all of the functionality of the desktop calendar.
• Ability to open up and share any type of document such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.
• A great new product, Google Drawings, that replaces desktop solutions like Viseo
• Constant innovation in products with a focus on reliability and the user experience

All in all Google Apps in an excellent solution for your small business. I have implemented it at different companies that swear by it now. Just recently Net Profit Marketing became a reseller of Google Apps Premier edition as well so we can migrate your company to Google Apps and support you after the move.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Jared Pomranky