Small Businesses have many options when considering collaboration suites. There are the legacy options such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino, GroupWise, etc. Those are great options for businesses that have the IT personal and IT budget to properly care for the infrastructure.
What about all of the companies that don’t have and IT department or have a small IT budget? What should they do? They should move their companies to Google Apps, and here is why:
- Email, calendar, contacts, and documents everywhere - Whether you are at work, home, or traveling users with internet access will be able to connect to their email, calendar, etc. This is all done without the need for open ports in your network firewall or additional software.
- Works with desktop clients and smartphones - Using the IMAP protocol, email can be accessed for any desktop client running any operating system. There are integration tools for popular programs such as Outlook, Thunderbird, and iCal for Google Calendar integration. Google Apps also syncs with all of the major smartphones.
- Secure connections - Users can be forced to use SSL security (also called https) to encrypt their connections to Google Apps services such as email, calendar, docs etc. Google also has a whitepaper detailing how your company data is kept safe in their datacenters.
- No backup worries - Most businesses these days run on email, but have you tested your backup plan lately? If your current system when down, how long would it be until you were back up and running?
- No hardware or IT costs – No in-house server needed which also means no IT person needed to perform maintenance on the server. The simple administration control panel allows users to be created or removed, and account permissions to be set without technical knowledge.
- Easy collaboration - Share calendars, share documents, send a meeting invitation, and voice or video chat with other employees or with anyone with a Google account.
- No software updates – Updates to Google Apps happens behind the scenes and without any required user intervention.
- Virus and spam filtering – Google Apps email integrates with Postini’s spam and virus protection. All attachements are scanned before they can be opened to prevent network infections.
- Lots of email storage space - As the flow of email increases so does the size of email boxes. Google Apps Premier Edition customers receive 25GB of storage, which is over 100% of the industry average.
- Free trial – Google Apps offers a free 30 day trial with no commitment required.
Need help convincing the rest of your company/organization? Contact me for help.
