Cut Expenses by using Google Apps

Are you spending hundreds of dollars a year on Website hosting and email with a Web hosting company? If so, you might want to take a look at Google Apps. It’s not for every business, so don’t go too crazy after reading this post and blindly cancel your hosting services and move to Google. Do some research, ask yourself, what am I doing with my current website? Do I NEED to use a web hosting company. Can Google’s website hosting, do what I need it to do? If you have a simple, static website page, chances are you can move to Google Apps and not miss a beat. But, if you serve up MLS listings, have sophisticated mapping technologies, lead generation tools, etc, moving to Google Apps may not be the best move (without significant investment). But, you shouldn’t overlook the other options, such as gmail (email), calendar tools and document storage.

Google Apps provides cost effective powerful communication, collaboration, security and compliance tools for small businesses. Google Apps gives you a documents service, Google email service (gmail), collaborative websites and even Google calendars.

With Google apps, you can even create Contact groups to act like distribution lists. This is a very powerful way of collaborating with your clients and not having to remember anyone’s email address or confusing which transactions they belong to.

IT costs can sometime spiral out of control. Or, hosting companies can sell you services and products that could be obtained for a lot less. Each entrepreneur or small business should evaluate their IT infrastructure, products/services they use to support their business, and determine if services such as Google Apps can do the job for less cost.

To give you an illustration on the services, I’ve set up a fake company URL (www.lacompts.com), using a branded logo, with Google Apps. The logo is cheesy so don’t grade me on the graphics. The whole process took me about an hour. Once I made the DNS changes, my test URL’s (below) were available in a few hours. Feel free to browse, add docs, appointments and explore what a branded Google Apps looks like. I’ve set up test account credentials…use these when prompted. (username = testaccount , password = chicagotitle)

Even though this is a test account, the gmail still works…so please play nice.

http://www.lacompts.com – See a sample website

http://docs.lacompts.com – Google Documents

http://calendar.lacompts.com – Google Calendar

http://mail.lacompts.com – Google Email

Really interested?? Let’s discuss the requirements on doing all of the above. First off, to do the custom URL (like above), you need to have and own a URL. You must also have access to the DNS records (CNAMES, MX Record, A Record). Don’t worry…if I lost you with the technical talk, Google has great resources to help you throughout the process. There are also numerous Solution Providers (http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/) that are willing to help small businesses get set up with Google Apps for a low upfront cost (range $29 – $99). But, if you have the technical knowledge, it can all be done by you, at no cost.

To sign up for the Google Apps Standard Edition go to (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html).

I hope this was beneficial and gives you another thing to consider when renewing your Hosting Services or looking for ways to cut expenses.
Happy Computing!