Google Apps for Your Domain
Published: 29 Aug 2006
Google Apps for Your Domain is a suite of free hosted services for small businesses, at www.google.com/a. At the moment, the suite (it really should be called Google Office) is a bundle of existing Google products, loosely integrated by the way you manage them for your business and the fact that they share a domain -- your domain.
For example, I set up a fictitious company, DemoArigato. Google's suite offers this firm small-business versions of the communications apps Gmail, Chat and Calendar. The suite gives everybody in the company a branded version of the applications. So now if you send email to rafe@demoarigato.com, I'll get it (this is not exactly new; in February the company released Gmail for Your Domain). The suite makes it easy to manage user accounts, and you can even replace the Gmail and Calendar logos with your own.
However, Google Apps for Your Domain does not provide Web site registration and hosting, which Microsoft Office Live beta (currently only available in the US) does for free. Microsoft's online small-business tools also enable users to pay more for a total of 20 business applications in addition to a Web page design tool.
The Google suite also includes Page Creator. This is Google's tool for creating and managing a simple company Web site, now actually at the domain of your choice. As of this writing, the domain site www.demoarigato.com isn't calling up the Google page I created using the product -- it can take up to two days for domain maps to update across the Internet.
Setting up Google Office was actually harder than installing software, since it required logging on to my domain registrar (where I parked the demoarigato domain) and changing settings so that the Google services would appear to run on demoarigato.com. Not only will Google not do this for you, the instructions were not perfectly aligned with my registrar's Web interface, so I was left wondering if I had in fact set everything up correctly (since the Web page isn't live yet, I'm still not sure). It would be much easier if Google offered domain registration itself; then, presumably, the settings could be made automatically.
Also, as a hosted business suite, Google is missing a few big elements. There's no word processor, spreadsheet or presentation program, although Google does have both a word processor (Writely) and a spreadsheet in beta.
The productivity applications will be integrated into this suite later, it's been reported, but it's not clear how they'll work as part of an office suite. Writely and Spreadsheets have different interfaces, and they store their files separately, so not only do they not work well together, but we've yet to see how file management will be handled in a group setting.
There are also no native offline applications for the suite. This is fine if all your employees work full-time in front of connected computers, but it's not so hot when they're on planes or if they want to use mobile devices to send mail or access their calendars (see Calgoo for a solution).
Then there's security. In the wake of the AOL search-data flap, do you want all your company's communications stored on Google servers?
The suite of applications in this 1.0 version of Google's first official small-business suite is unimpressive when you compare it to the capabilities of a business-focused workgroup application, such as Joyent, a productivity suite such as Zoho's and especially the capabilities of the full line of applications and services from Microsoft. But it's an excellent deal for a small business, and the applications are easy to use once you get the servers configured. Today, it's a useful suite for simple and undemanding small businesses.
Related articles
Writely beta
Review Can Writely replace Microsoft Word? Yes, if you have stable Internet access and don't need a lot of editing and formatting features. [22 Jun 2006]
Microsoft Office Live beta
Preview Microsoft's suite of online tools is designed to help small businesses build and maintain a Web presence and manage projects, contacts and tasks. [15 Feb 2006]
Google Page Creator beta
Preview This simple tool, still in beta, helps you make a basic Web page in a few easy steps. [10 Apr 2006]
Google Spreadsheets: a first look
Preview Following its purchase of Writely, Google has made another move into Web-based office productivity tools. Here are our first impressions. [07 Jun 2006]
Did you find this article useful?
99 out of 181 people found this useful
Full Talkback thread
1 comment
