Google Apps

When I came on board with The Clarke Allen Group, I found that we suffered from the same basic infrastructure problems that many small businesses face in this evolving world: emerging technology.  We had issues with lost emails, finding documents for clients, and managing our people and time well.

A friend of mine, who also happens to do a lot of work with IT and web design, recommended that we look into a cloud solution.  Upon a bit of research, I stumbled onto a few solutions but was really intrigued by one in particular.

Google Apps really caught my eye because of its low cost (free at that time for under 50 users, now free for up to 10) and functionality.  After going through the myriad of applications, I found that it could easily cover most of our needs.

The primary Apps that have helped us reorganize and grow our business have been Gmail, Docs, and Calendar.  Gmail allows you to use your company's branding (yourname@yourcompany.com) with their cloud based service.  It has amazing redundancy with near 100% uptime.  Considering the days of old clunky office MX servers, this is a godsend for us.  Not only that, you take advantage of Google's security professionals to manage the risks.  Personally, I will gladly trust Google's team any day of the week over a few IT professionals locally.

Docs has reduced our need for hard copies of every single item of business.  For most of our internal documents, we can create, share, collaborate, edit, and save in a redundant cloud.  The beauty of this is two-fold.  You now have your company's documents available any where in the world that has internet and you're significantly reducing your carbon footprint by using a considerable amount less paper.

Finally, and probably my favorite, is Google Calendar.  Within this App, one can easily schedule and invite users to meetings and events.  The best part of it to me is its ability to easily sync up on modern smart phones especially if they're Android based.  I can see schedules for all of my employees from my desktop, laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

Google Apps even offers a few tools to help businesses with the transition such as email syncing and calendar syncing.  These help you migrate from your old system to Apps.  So there is really no excuse to not do it.  As I stated earlier, Google Apps is free for organizations under 10 people and is $50 a person per year beyond that (non-profits are $30).

We can help you migrate and the entire process can usually be concluded in a few days.