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Google Apps : the go-to email solution for SMEs
Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 10 April 2012 | 
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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.
The impact of Google + for you or your business
Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 16 January 2012 | 2
Last week, Google announced that results from Google+ will be more prominent in its search engine. This can have a significant impact on results when people type in your name or the name of your company.
What is this about?
Google said on its official blog that its goal is to help users find the best results on the web, not just web pages, but the results published by people we know and with whom we already share other data. They therefore include three important elements: 1 - personal results: results that come from your own network on Google+ 2 - profiles: Google+ profiles of individuals who are part of your network will be increasingly present in the search results, and even in the 'auto-complete' search engine 3 - personal profiles and company profiles: profiles of individuals who are not in your network (and who are willing to publicly share their profile) will be increasingly present. The other important issue for business managers is that the pages on Google+ will also have a growing place in the search results. These pages are the Google+ equivalent of Facebook pages.
The response from the community
Reactions of the technology community are not very favorable. Inevitably, Twitter feels left out and considers it bad news for the Internet in general. The same tone was adopted by a journalist of the popular techno blog Gizmodo, who claims to have changed its default search engine to Bing. In addition, Google is under scrutiny from the FTC. The Commission would be accusing it of using its dominant position in the search market to advantage its own product and then close the door to other social networks.
What it means for you
1 – No matter what the community says, this new functionality will be active from now on and will have a growing importance. It is therefore essential, if you want to appear correctly in search results that you have a profile on Google+.
2 - If you have a business or an organization/cause, you should seriously consider creating a page on the network. Your address, your website and your services will be found more easily in the most widely used search engine.
3 - If you want to benefit from this new tool and find it cool, it becomes even more important to have an account and interact on the new social network. On the other hand, if you are already on Facebook and Twitter, and would like to benefit from these features, I advise you to encourage Wajam, a growing Montreal-based company that developed an excellent application to show results from your other social networks directly in Google search results.
Some links:
The announcement on the Official Google Blog
Post on Gizmodo
Create a page on Google +
FTC concerns
Wajam
Refine your Google Searches
Written by Jean-Michel Marcotte | 19 May 2010 | 0
I recently discovered a website which can make complex searches on Google very simple. The website is named guiGoog and no, I don't know how to pronounce that. It's actually one of the reasons why I'm writing about it.
Some of guiGoog's functionalities can be real time-savers, especiially if you're a student, journalist or anyone else who probably spends too much time surfing on Google. Basically, what guiGoog does is repackaging Google's advanced search functions.
Here are the main functionnalities:
-Search within a date range, easily
-Include/exclude filetypes in your search
-Include/exclude urls in your search results
-Search from a specific country, or even postal code or city
-Search in a precise language
For some of us who do not want to be redirected to Google.ca because you're from here, it can be a plus.
To make this post complete, I even made a trial search with my name in France in pdf format between 2001 and 2002. Surprisingly, something comes up.
So the name is guiGoog, very useful website but awkward to pronounce.
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