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.
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