We love Google Apps
Consult and Design today made the decision to move all our client e-mail to Google Apps following successful trials with both our internal mail and a number of clients.
E-mail has proven to be one of the most temperamental and difficult part of our work as a supplier of online technologies, which is mainly due to the following:
- 90% of e-mail is Spam - we talked about this earlier in our blog. This figure is always rising and from a techie point of view, what that means is a whole lot of work to filter out and deal with an abundance of useless information. This not only takes our time but precious server resources we could be using for other things.
- E-mail is absolutely mission critical. Should your business website go down for a few hours, for whatever reasons, it is possible to make visitors aware that this is temporary, and it is not going to destroy your reputation, or lose any information. E-mail problems however can and often will do both of these things, and wont give you an opportunity to put up a this service is temporarily unavailable message but just sends out those horrible Undeliverable Mail messages.
So how does Google Apps deal with these problems? Well, basically Google Apps allows an organisation or business to activate google services but using your own domain name. So, in the case of e-mail, with Google Apps you get the highly acclaimed Google Mail interface, but instead of your address being yourname@googlemail.com, you actually get yourname@yourdomainname.com. Not only that but your mail comes branded with your company logo. We think this is pretty amazing, but the best bit is, its completely FREE.
Here are the main benefits of using Google Apps with your business:
- Arguably the best web-based interface for e-mail that has ever been invented, and all new updates to the G-Mail interface which adds new features almost every week!
- Full integration with your mobile products, Outlook, Apple Mail, indeed any e-mail application you can think of.
- Additional accounts (up to 100) can be set up within a few seconds. Need a new e-mail address in a hurry? You can do so by simply entering a name and a password.
- Currently over 7Gigabytes of mail space and this is constantly growing. Access your e-mail in full, anytime and anywhere.
- All the added functionality of Google Calendar, Google Documents and Google Sites and all branded with your logo and company name.
The list goes on and on but we thing this is one of the best additions to the internet world of recent years and were rolling it out to all our customers currently using Consult and Design mail.
If youre a current customer then contact us, and we can add this to your account if we havent already. If youre a new customer, contact us and we can set you up with Google Apps and your own domain name (if you dont already have one) for as little as £99*. This is the set-up fee, and following this, the use of the service is absolutely free of charge.
For more information on Goole Apps, visit: www.google.com/a
*Fee depends on your current e-mail and domain set-up. While for the vast majority of customers this will be the case, if you already have a complex or large e-mail set-up, this fee could rise. We will never increase this fee without prior knowledge and a detailed quote and justification before starting work.
