When you say "Google", most people think of that speedy search engine that knows everything about everything on the internet. A lot of people do not know that Google has its hands in many other markets as well. We could write a whole book on all of them as well as the ones they are working on, but I think we will just stick with their product called "Google Apps". Google Apps is a combination of several Google Applications. The two that we will focus on are:

• Google Mail
• Google Calendar

We at BIGSHOT have been using Google Apps for our Company Email and Calendar since September 2007 and could not be happier. We believe in this technology so much that we have made a bold move in support of this technology. Moving forward, we are not hosting email for new clients on our servers. It just does not make sense for us or our clients and here is why…

Google Mail

Most people who have their email hosted with the website host have to deal with restrictions. Typically, the biggest ones are disk space and accessibility.

Disk Space:
A lot of hosts place limits on email accounts of 25MB – 50MB per account. Granted, Microsoft Outlook usually deletes all of your email from your host's server after it is downloaded, but then you can only access that from that computer. What happens if that computer crashes? You could potentially lose your email.

Accessibility:
You have to be sitting on the computer that Microsoft Outlook is installed on or use a very basic and not very pretty web-based email client to access email that Microsoft Outlook has not yet delete.

Solution? …Google Mail of course

Google Mail solves both of these issues. At the time of this writing, Google Mail gives each email address 6.65 GB of disk space. In perspective, that is 266 times more space than you typically receive from your host. Also, Google Mail is accessible from any computer in the world with an internet connection.

You may be wondering by now, can I keep my email address? The short answer is: Yes. If you own the domain name and we are hosting your website, you are set!

Let's take a short tour of the features and have a look at some screenshots.

Inbox

© Google, Inc.

This Web 2.0 look is very easy to navigate. I think the interface is very self explanatory.

Conversation View

© Google, Inc.

This may be the second best feature of Google Mail. When someone replies to a message, all of the replies are grouped together. This allows you to very easily track the discussion in an email.

After that last comment about Conversation View possibly being second best feature in Google Mail, you may be asking yourself what the number one feature is. Well, quite simply, Google has the best SPAM filtering in the world. I get a lot of email and my email address is out there more than I would like it to be. But, to this day, I think Google has accidentally let SPAM be delivered into my inbox 4 times in the last 7 months. No, I did not miss a digit… I said four. To my knowledge, I have never had a false positive. That is where a legit email is flagged as SPAM.

Want to see Google Mail in action?

Google Mail Tutorial: ~6 minutes

Google Calendar

Without having an expensive Exchange Server, it used to be hard to have integrated calendars. Using Google Calendar, employees at BIGSHOT can see what other employees have on their calendars. This is a great way to know when someone will be out of the office for whatever reason, schedule meetings without conflicts, track company holidays and birthdays.

Week View

© Google, Inc.

This is the main view of the calendar. Notice that you can see your calendar along with others that have been shared with you. In my work calendar, I have my personal calendar showing along with the rest. BIGSHOT has even created a special calendar for Birthdays and Holidays to keep everyone up to date on special days.

My favorite feature of Google Calendars is the reminder feature. You can have it create a popup, send you an email, or my favorite, SMS. It will send a text message to your phone to remind you of important meetings and events.

Want to see Google Calendar in action?

Google Calendar Tutorial: ~9 minutes

From the videos, you can see that there are many more features than those listed here. Google Mail and Google Calendar are two great products that have served us very well and we think you will like it too.

Kenneth Crowder has been involved in the Joomla! Community since the days of Mambo. He has volunteered many hours to help out the Open Source Project. He is considered an expert in all things related to Joomla!. He was a Technical Reviewer for Joomla! A Users Guide, as well as another book currently in the editing phase. Learn more about Ken.

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Barrie North said:

	I have been using google apps for domain for several months now. Its so good, I might even spring for the $50 a year sub for it.
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June 16, 2008 | url
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Brian Teeman said:

Having spent the last year working on a UK government project its not surprising that I had my first, and thankfully, only interaction with outlook an exchange. As far as it handling email it does a pretty good job in a corporate or large environment and if configured correctly, which is a rare event, can be very powerful. I have particularly loved the way it can push by emails to my 3G phone. But the Outlook calendar SUCKS!!!! It has so many features 90% of the users cant do even the most simple of tasks and that includes me, and I like to think I'm pretty good at this computer game. Google Calendar however concentrates on doing one thing well, handling date based events and it does it in a way that is easy to understand.

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June 16, 2008
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