Recently I went in search of a better email solution for our company, something in particular that would  improve communication and collaboration internally between ourselves and of course with our customers. After looking into numerous offerings I spent the last week or so using and testing Google Apps. Overall it’s been an interesting and mostly positive experience  but it has also been complicated at times to get working the way I’d like.

What is Google Apps?

Google Apps is  a collection of online software applications that run through your browser. The main apps include:

• Gmail – A web based email client, now with IMAP support so you can also use a desktop email client with it if you like
• Google Docs -  online word processing, spreadsheets etc.
• Google Calendar – an online calendar for organising meetings, events, birthdays etc.

Google Apps comes in two flavours: Standard and Premium. Standard is free whilst Premium costs €40 per user. At the moment we’re using the standard edition which allows up to 50 users and provides 8GB of email storage per user. Upgrading to Premium would increase email storage to 25GB per user and provide other benefits including a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

In addition to Gmail, Google Apps also allows you to share and collaborate on documents using Google Docs and with the Google Calender you can share meetings and events etc. with users in your company or even provide a public event calendar. There are other apps and lots of other features that you can check out on the Google Apps website.

Setting up Google Apps

Setup is straight forward if you are using  just one website domain although we needed to handle multiple email addresses across multiple domains. This isn’t an uncommon use for it but it did get complicated and a few workarounds were needed to get it setup satisfactorily.

Gmail for Business email

Gmail offers many benefits over other email solutions including a spam filter which is apparently second to none, lots of storage space, better large file attachment handling and emails are stored on Googles servers so if one server fails everything should continue to run fine on another. And with IMAP you can access and synchronise your email on multiple devices.

Although the Gmail web client is not without a few short comings, which for us include no auto bcc and no support for multiple signatures, using Gmail/IMAP with a flexible email client such as Thunderbird works really well and for the most part resolves these problems.

One of the very few minor gripes with Thunderbird/Gmail combo is duplicate messages shown in the conversation view in Thunderbird. It displays copies of emails for each label in conversation view which makes for a slightly dodgy conversation view vs the Gmail web client. You can unsubscribe from certain folders/labels to remedy this but some labels are better left subscribed to such as Gmails default All Mail and of course your own custom ones. I find it  nicer to read emails in Gmails web client but Thunderbirds features and flexibility make it better for sending and replying. Hopefully both are improved in the future so we can use one or the other without sacrifice.

It’s early days yet for me but so far Google Apps seems to be a great option for business email and with the bonuses of online document collaboration, calendars and more it’s even better.