If you have read my blog before you may know that I love Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD). GAFYD comes in two flavours Premier and Standard. Premier costs US$50 per person per year and Standard is FREE!. At this stage, for a very small business, I see no compelling reason to pay for GAFYD – just stick with the Standard version. The main things you get with Premium over and above the Standard is additional support, more storage space, the ability to turn off ads in Gmail, Outlook syncing, resource scheduling in Calendar and Google Video.
GAFYD is aimed squarely at businesses currently using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange – they even have a Migration Guide for Exchange administrators. Recently, Google made Gmail a fully fledged Exchange account to enable syncing of Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar to your mobile device very straightforward. For small business, GAFYD is now a compelling choice as an Exchange replacement. There is a great article showing Outlook users how to work with Gmail, as getting used to the threaded conversations can be challenging for some people (but since Outlook 2010 now has threaded conversations, it definitely looks like it is the way to go.
But it does not stop there – the A in GAFYD is Apps. Currently the Google “Apps” are Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites. But soon GAFYD users will get other Google Apps such as Reader, Blogger, Picasa and hopefully even more (No sign of Wave or Google Voice yet for GAFYD – or no sign of Google Voice in Aus yet either). The addition of Blogger and Picasa will be very helpful for small teams as it will enable them to share pictures and have multiple people blog from the one account.
The benefit of Google Docs for most small businesses or teams does not need a lot of explaining – documents backed up, central location, real time collaboration and editing of documents, instant sharing etc. Now you can upload any files, not just documents to Google Docs, and there are a heap of new features that make it really very useful.
For me, I struggle to use Google Docs for absolutely everything – especially spreadsheets and printed documents. As an Excel expert, there are some limitations with Google Spreadsheet that just make it too hard to use, and whilst I will happily create a draft document or collaborate on a draft in Google Docs, if I want to print it, I will use Word – just to get the fine grained control. There is a product called OffiSync that allows you to open documents on Google Docs with Office, but I have not tried it yet.
The benefit of using Google Sites for small business and teams is probably not that apparent yet, and frankly it has quite a long way to go to be really a fantastic product for day to day office productivity. Google Sites came out of the purchase of a great product called JotSpot, which was then weakened down to what we now have in Sites. It’s meant to be a bit of everything. It can be an externally facing website, an internally facing Intranet, a Wiki, a Blog and a collaboration platform. There is a good overview video of it’s functionality.
As I loved the old Google Pages, Google Sites is a really poor cousin and I would not recommend it for an externally facing website, but it could be good as an Intranet or small internal Wiki.
So overall GAFYD is a must for small businesses, and even just one person with a domain, like me – yes jodiem.com.au runs GAFYD! Hopefully soon, I will be able to ditch my Gmail account as my primary account and be able to use my GAFYD account to use for all Google services.
Well, going to the GAFYD bar is certainly easier than trying to set up hosted exchange for yourself. The latter was more like being shown a detailed instruction manual by the Exchange BOFH, only to see them throw all of the unbound pages in the air and leave you to it. Yes, 52 pickup. It gets more (less) interesting if you are trying to wrangle a shedload of email address across 2 domains, with plenty of domain aliases for each one, plus gmail, plus a couple of hotmail / live accounts.
I actually started 2 GAFYD accounts, one for my personal domain and one for my private domain. In both cases I opted-in for the 30-day trial of the premier version so I could use the Apps Sync thingy to drag all of my email from outlook into the cloud. It will ask for a credit card but is doesn’t charge you until the trial lapses into a paid account. Just set a reminder in your shiny new Google calendar.
Syncing is a slow process so 30 days is cutting it fine. Nah, only kidding. Don’t be surprised if it takes a whole day or longer though. I split my email into business & personal using 2 Outlook PST files. I am presently running a sync to each Google account on separate computers. There are literally a few thousand emails in each account. Sheesh. I’ve uploaded 4-1/2 GB already and it’s not done.
The sync tool is effective but particularly informative. I can’t tell whether it is still going or not. It says it is finished but the email count in my GAFYD inbox is still climbing. It seems to stop and start a lot. I’m going to leave it overnight & see how it goes. Don’t forget to use an environmentally-unfriendly power setting if you do this so it doesn’t just get bored and go to sleep. I know I will. It actually does eventually pop up and tell you it’s done. Eventually.
Google’s step-by-step setting-up instructions are pretty good. I have a fair amount of experience in managing my websites & DNS records. Don’t let all the acronyms scare you. To really play it safe, open up your old settings in a browser window and leave them there while you enter up your new settings. At least this will give you somewhere to go back to.
When iOS4 finally gets released I will be able to set both accounts up as pushed exchange email accounts. That should do wonders for my battery life. Presently on iOS 3 the iPhone will only allow 1 Exchange account. It has some shortfalls, like searching the server for emails (forget it, it won’t) but, by and large, it’s good. You can search in the mobile web browser anyway so it’s not hassle.
Depending on how much storage (or fancy features) I need I may actually keep the premier account on my business domain. At this stage it is highly unlikely & I’ll probably cancel the trial. I certainly don’t need it for my personal domain, except for the one-time sync.
As a bonus I’ll get about 4GB of disk space back when I delete the Outlook PSTs – well, when I archive them off to cold storage. Added bonus – no more Outlook freezes and crashes.
As an unexpected bonus, you can open any number of different GAFYD inboxes side-by-side in the same browser (2 in my case), as well as staying signed into the (one) Gmail account my reader etc is associated with (if not – log out on the reader page & log in again). Go The Cloud!
Thanks for being so convincing Jodie – you were right, all along. This is the easy way. And it works.