August 28, 2006

Google Apps for Domains - Making it Better for All of Us

There's no fancy opening line I can say, but Google continues to advance and develop free applications that smaller businesses can use to be more productive. Today Google launched Google Apps for your Domain, a collection of four (at this time) applications including Email, Talk, Calendar and Web publishing.

Google Apps for Domains is starting to compete head to head with other online tools offered from Microsoft (Office Live), BlueTie, eUnifyDB and WebExOne.

With Google apps for Domains, Google enables an organization to host these suite of tools (email, calendar, talk, web publishing) with their own custom domain name. Should you try it? The thought of 2GBs of storage per mail box as opposed to the 10MBs my web host Hypermart gives is VERY tempting. However, I'm not going to rush into having Google host my domain email as I want to be more sure that it's stable and is up 99.9% of the time. Right now Blogger.com (owned by Google) is down form time to time. That's acceptable for a free blogging service but not for a domain tied to my email that I need to operate on demand.

Network computing writes The ultimate objective is to provide a service for organizations of all sizes so they can communicate and share information more effectively by eliminating the expense and time associated with maintaining a communications infrastructure. And that type of on-demand software delivery is becoming more attractive to businesses.

What Google is doing, like they did for email is causing the competition to DO MORE for us. To keep the industry on their toes to offer better service at better prices.

Read CNet's take on this Setting up Google Office was actually harder than installing software, since it required logging on to my domain registrar (where I parked the demoarigato domain) and changing settings so that the Google services would appear to run on demoarigato.com. Not only will Google not do this for you, the instructions were not perfectly aligned with my registrar's Web interface, so I was left wondering if I had in fact set everything up correctly (since the Web page isn't live yet, I'm still not sure). It would be much easier if Google offered domain registration itself; then, presumably, the settings could be made automatically.

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