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Google Apps : the go-to email solution for SMEs

Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 10 April 2012 | 0

All small and medium businesses should know about and consider using Google Apps for their email management. For up to 10 users, the solution is free and for more e-mail addresses, costs are very reasonable at around $5 per user per month.

What Google Apps is

In short, Google Apps is a cloud-based solution allowing business managers to create and delete email addresses for the company. It is one of many services offered by Google for businesses, after Adwords. It's extends to being an office application suite similar to Microsoft's Office but with emails as its central point. Companies that want to register need to authenticate their domain name in order to send and receive from it, and eventually use the whole cloud-based application suite under the company's umbrella. It allows all the employees to use Gmail as an email client software without using an @gmail address. The migration process is not very complex and there are many benefits depending on the technological habits of the company switching.

Advantages

- Benefit from Gmail as the email client solution but still be able to use Outlook, Mail by Apple, Thunderbird or any other email client. Google Apps can work with POP or IMAP. - Accessing the complete Google application suite with a company email: Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc. - Using the calendar is a definitive plus. It works impressively well and integrates with any device in a very simple way. - No need to manage a physical or remote server for emails, as is the case for Microsoft Exchange.

Disadvantages

- Ads in your email client. As it is the case for the basic Gmail interface, Gmail under Google Apps is also filled with ads. It can still be eliminated by using Outlook or another client. - The uncertain future for the service. Many signs show that Google will not make it a core component in their future growth strategy mainly since Larry Page stepped in as CEO. - Data exposure to Google. If your very concerned about the location of your email data and do not trust Google much, the idea of sharing with them and having them hosting your data might not please you so much either. For Canadian companies, it's also worth noting that your customers, partners or perhaps even your company might not be legally comfortable with having sensitive data physically hosted in the US.

Tags: Cloud, Email client, Google Apps , Logiciel de courriels, Outils, Outlook, PME,