Google Apps for small firms

A few days ago Google launched a new product called Google Apps for Your Domain (unofficially named Gafyd for short). It is a collection of existing Google products (Gmail, Gtalk, Calender and Page Creator) that you can tie to an existing internet domain. It is aimed at smaller organisations looking for a common solution to email, shared calendars and a bit more. Gafyd is free in the beta period but you have to apply for the service.

I set up Google Apps for Your Domain this weekend for Zonoma, the consulting firm through which I offer my services. As I was already using all the services included with Gafyd I wasn't expecting huge changes from signing up but two benefits stand out:

• Previously, I used url forwarding to send visitors who wanted to go to www.zonoma.com on to my googlepages.com website. Using Gafyd, the website now lives at zonoma.com which looks more professional and will make navigation more logical when the site grows bigger than one page.
• Gafyd offers up to 25 user accounts on the zonoma.com domain. This allows me to lend Zonoma email addresses to team members when Zonoma starts delivering projects bigger than my own resource (we wouldn't necessarily have to use this approach every time but it is good to have the option if circumstances call for it). My email address stays Lars@Zonoma.com as I previously used email forwarding.

Setting up Google Apps for Your Domain requires you to confirm ownership of your internet domain. Setting up email and web pages requires some fiddling with the domain record held by your internet registrar but Gafyd gives clear instructions on how to accomplish this. After I had made all the changes it took about two hours for Gafyd to verify the changes and activate email and web pages. A simple administrator's dashboard informs of service status and provides access to settings and user admin.

I can think of several firms where Google Apps for Your Domain would have been an appropriate and simple solution to internal and external communications. The calendar alone would be a useful component of a collaborative infrastructure. I can imagine that the service would be useful for virtual teams too, working together in the way envisaged by Tom Malone in The Future of Work.

For subsequent versions of Gafyd, Google say they will add Personalized Start Page to the service although I can see a stronger case for Writely and Google's collaborative spreadsheets. A premium service is promised for later in 2006. A feature I would vote for would be custom domain addresses (such as mail.zonoma.com) to make it easier to work from sites where webmail is blocked.

If you are a small business or organisation and you don't already share a good email / calendar / IM solution, go apply for Google Apps for Your Domain.

Tags: Google Google Google Apps Google Apps for Your Domain Gafyd collaboration small business calendar

Comments

[Rajesh Kumar]

You have a nice blog Lars.