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.

As usual we’ve made lots of changes and improvements but the most notable new features and imporvements include:

• Parent/Child hierarchy category management
• Treeview navigation menu with expand/collapse menu categories
• File caching for lower memory usage and faster page loads
• Recently viewed products functionality
• Related products functionality
• CSV Import (import 1000’s of products in seconds)

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Finneran Entry Systems

Technologies and programming used in the development of this website include html, xhtml, css, php, flash, jquery and javascript.

Website features include flash animation, jquery menu, jquery tabs, image gallery with lightbox effect and contact form.

Sizebreed Construction

Technologies and programming used in the development of this website include html, xhtml, css, php, flash, jquery and javascript.

Website features include animated banner, jquery tabs, Google map and contact form.

Eclipse featuring Abba Vous

Technologies and programming used in the development of this website include html, xhtml, css, php, flash, jquery and javascript.

Website design features include animated background, mp3 player, jquery image gallery and customised contact form.

Engineering company website design

We recently launched a new website for Irish engineering company Prism Engineering. Based in Ballymount, Co. Dublin they design and manufacture metal parts and products for a wide range of industries including the architectural and security industry.

Technologies and programming used in the development of this website include html, xhtml, css, php,  jquery and javascript.

Website design features include alpha blended backgrounds, drop down menu, image lightbox and cross-slide image technique.

• New product option to enable/disable file upload when ordering a product
• Support for user groups – access to categories and products can now be restricted
• Support for additional/replacement text on product prices

The file upload option gives customers the option to upload a file when ordering a particular product in the shopping cart. Useful if for example you want a customer to upload an image that can be then printed or inscribed etc. on a product.

With user groups you can for example create a reseller user group and then restrict reseller products and categories to be shown only to registered customers in the reseller user group.

More flexibility with the product prices now means if you don’t want to show a price on a product you can now enter text which will be shown instead if the price is zero or if greater than zero the text will be shown after the price.

A multitude of other minor improvements have also been made in this release.