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So…this is my first real post for 2008. Thankfully, it’s technology related. As I mentioned, I’m hoping to begin posting on this blog more regularly. I’ve even created a recurring event in my calendar to try and set aside some time to do so. On to my posting…

I’ve come across the Google Apps website on a couple occasions before, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and really see what it’s all about. I knew that it provided users with a way to utilize the awesome applications that Google puts out on a more customized basis - specifically for your organization. But that’s about as far as I had gotten. Until the other day.

A little background…I’ve been giving some real thought to improving my companies’ collaboration efforts, and have been doing some research on different options. Our current solution is just too flaky, and piece mealed together. We currently host our e-mail on a dedicated server off site. Some use IMAP to connect to the server, others use POP. On top of that we don’t really have a calendaring solution in place. Some of us are using Google Calendar, others are using .mac for their iCals, etc. In the IM realm, we all have our personal IM accounts that we use to communicate when we’re online, but none of this is centralized, or personalized to the company. With all of these different tools, it’s difficult to find contact information for any one person. Needless to say, that makes planning meetings and staying on top of e-mails when we’re out of the office a little difficult. Which, as we continue to grow, I find myself needing to do more and more. What do we do?

There are plenty of options out there for an organization to try and centralize these communication channels. As a small business, we really don’t have the money to throw at this problem so some of the larger scale options are out of the question. After doing some research, I came across what I thought was a good option. I contemplated the idea of setting up an internal server and managing an open source application called Funambol. This really seemed to be the most viable option as it provided truly centralized collaboration efforts, and even gave us some cool features like push email, and over the air sync. Not to mention, it’s open source so we had the ability to customize it if we needed. While I didn’t really like the idea of managing another piece of hardware, I thought it was probably our best bet.

As I was playing around with Funambol last week, I remembered coming across the Google Apps site and figured maybe I’d take another look and see what it was all about. Perhaps it provided a solution that could be pretty simple. I was right! The more and more I looked at the site, and saw what all it had to offer, the more and more excited I got that I might have found an answer for us. Google Apps provides your organization with a truly centralized suite of web applications that focus mainly around collaboration between employees. The initial offering provides organizations with semi-customizable, hosted versions of their GMail(e-mail), Google Calendar(calendar), and Google Talk(chat) applications. On top of that, they provide organizations with access to Google Docs for file collaboration, Google Sites for creating team or project pages, and iGoogle for customizable dashboards for each user - one thing we’ve been looking at developing in-house.

I’m not ruling Funambol out just yet, as I want to make sure that Google Apps really meets all of our needs. However, my initial findings are looking very promising. I think I may pilot the standard edition on cdev technologies and see how it all works out. With the upcoming launch of my new technology partnership, I’m thinking we may start the company with these tools in place. Assuming everything goes as planned with the pilot.

Google never ceases to amaze me. The people that they have working over there are brilliant.

I’ll be sure to chronicle my findings as I play some more with Google Apps. I’m sure others will be interested to hear about the process.

Till next time!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Google, Google Apps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.