Google Apps

Benefits of Using Own Domain Email on Google Apps Gmail

Your Email ID is a valuable marketing tool for you, and Email ID of your own domain tells that you have an online presence, where people can find you, etc. Its also a tool to promote your company, as you are promoting your domain by that. Your Email ID will promote your domain rather than Gmail or Yahoo. You can even see here why to go for own domain Email ID. ;-) You can have own domain Email ID using your hosting company’s web mail or buy Email space at some hosting company. But according to me, Google Apps Gmail is provides the best own domain email solutions, and above all, its free(Standard package). Below are few of the many reasons why you should use Google Apps Gmail for your Email purposes.

Reliability/Uptime

Our web servers keep experiencing downs and crashes, and it is a pain when you are on a shared server or low-memory VPS. Imagine you were using your hosting company’s web mail, and had to receive an important email that time when your website/server was down. It will simply bounce. By using Google Apps Gmail you overcome this, as when you use Google Apps all the associated data will be stored on Google Data centers which runs your Email services effortlessly and gives 99.9% uptime.

Collaboration

Domain users can share their calendar from any computer, see when people are available, send invitations, manage RSVPs, do real time editing on documents, spreadsheets & presentations. Also access Instant Messaging (IM)(Using Gtalk) from any computer.

Space

If you have a small dedicated or VPS Hosting, then you probably get small amount of hard drive space, and Email particularly takes a lot of space especially if you have many users. Going with Google Apps Email helps here again, as it provides at least 7 GB of storage on Email accounts and this also increases your server’s efficiency as the load is not on your server for the Email services.

Security

Your SMTP server might get flooded with Spam or SQL hacks might steal credentials of your users. You overcome these also because of Google Apps. You can even disable the email server that came with your hosting account, that is the IMAP/POP3 server and the SMTP. This saves memory too.

Conclusion

There are many more reasons for you to go with Google Apps Gmail, but if you need customized Email service for your company, like custom layout and branding on your users mailboxes then Google Apps Gmail might not be a great option as it isn’t really very flexible. If you need to use for personal purposes or branding doesnt matters, then Google Apps it is! Even if you have a huge organization you can still go with Google Apps as they have multiple editions to suit your needs, plus you get all the Google Apps benefits.

Microsoft Office 365 public beta now available

Microsoft had announced Microsoft Office 365 back in October 2010, the successor of Microsoft Office 2011. It will feature next generation cloud productivity service. This new version gives you access to email, calendar, and contacts from anywhere on a wide range of devices and enables real time editing of documents and spreadsheets with others.

Microsoft Office 365 will also feature tight security, it will help protect you from spam and viruses. It is called Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, which includes multiple filters and virus-scanning engines.
The new version has set of web enabled tools, where you can view and edit documents with Office Web Apps on various web browsers. Like Google Apps, with more features and not being free.

The public beta is now available, you can see it at Office365.com.

Pricing and Licensing

The pricing is not really bad, neither very good. It starts with $6 per user per month for up to 50 users at max. Currently subscription is only available on a month-to-month basis with automatic renewal each month which you can cancel at any time with no early termination fee. Google Apps has a big edge over Office 365 in pricing.

Using Google services for a Website/blog

Google provides number of services/products to promote your blog or website on the Internet, the good thing about these services are that most of them are free for a very low price. These services are very helpful in various things. And all of its services works great for all types of blogs and websites.

Most of the services have a main focus for improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from Google Search engine via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results(viz. SEO).

Here is the list of Google Services for a Website/Blog :
In the order of their importance

  • Google Adsense:Offers a contextual advertising solution to web publishers Delivers text-based Google AdWords ads that are relevant to site content pages. Its great for earning huge bucks and trustworthy too(Because its Google).

  • Feedburner:Allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. The best advantage is it converts a RSS feed to a Email newsletter by “Subscribe via Email” thing.
  • Google Webmaster tools:Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. One just need to verify the site and add Sitemaps.
  • Google Analytics:Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives.

  • Google Apps:
    Google Apps provide with Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites complement traditional office software to make teamwork easier. The best thing is it provides with a Email ID of your Domain just by adding MX data into your domain (Eg: [email protected]).
  • Google Friend Connect:
    Grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. Google Friend Connect means more people engaging more deeply with your website.
  • Google Custom Search:
    Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine for your very own site.