dance monkey, dance!

Ran across this at (where else) Digg. Brilliant!

Google Apps for Domains

Ok, so long story short: a practical joke at the office ended up in my purchase of a funny little domain that, to the outside world, will be used solely to host a simple website for a friend. But of course, for me, it's going to do so much more (cue sinister laugh).

I decided to use it to tinker with Google Apps for Domains.

This free (with paid version available) set of applications, including free email at your domain (a la gmail), Google Docs, shared calendaring, instant messaging, shared calendaring and contacts, etc., are a very impressive set, indeed, especially for the price. There is a paid version available, as well, which includes enhanced email security via Postini (which Google purchased last year in July), email recovery and compliance assurance, resource scheduling and even phone support (although, at $50/user/year, while one of the best, it's not the cheapest solution out there). Here's the rundown of the big features common to both free and paid:

• Gmail for your domain. Via DNS, you direct your MX records to google's servers, and they host your mail for you, which uses the gmail interface, or you may use the IMAP mail client of your choosing. 6.6GB (and growing!) of free email storage per user. Why would you pay to host your mail elsewhere?!
• Google Talk for your domain. Used either via the Gmail interface, dedicated Windows-based Google Talk application, or Apple iChat, your domain's gtalk automatically keeps your coworkers in each buddy list
• Calendaring. Shared group calendaring for all of your coworkers, via Google Calendar. Sharable with the outside world. [update 2008-08-17: a few weeks ago, Google CalDAV-enabled their calendars! Read/Write from iCal works great!]
  
• Google Docs. Google's Microsoft Office-competing online versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel. These little apps rock. No more are your documents single user-based.. they are remarkably easily-sharable documents that exist in a truly collaborative environment, all safe and secure on Google's über-SAN. Each application exports in a variety of formats, including of course the standard MS Office formats for those stuck back in the dark ages (heh). I cannot tell you how liberating not having to manage files is, as well.
  
• Google Sites and Start Page. I haven't played around much with Sites much, but from what I understand it's basically a WYSIWYG editor with templates that makes it easy to create company intranet pages. As for Start Page, this is your domain's version of iGoogle. Your users can populate their start page with the modules of their choosing, and administrators can define a domain-wide default Start Page. Modules include a Gtalk buddy list, Gmail inbox, weather, Google Docs, popular news sites, all kinds of stuff.

And of course, the beauty of all of this is that there are no servers or software to maintain (brilliant!). Being web-based, you know exactly what your users are seeing and experiencing (no worrying about what features Outlook, Mail, Thunderbird, Entourage, etc. support or do not support, no having to deal with each client app's own issues [Outlook's 2GB PST file limit damaged file stores, etc.], which is very important in a cross platform environment). But at the same time, it's nice to know that if you do have to use one of these desktop email clients, they're all supported as well.

So yeah, you have to look at this, compare Google's offering to traditional ISP offerings, and really ask yourself: why wouldn't just about every small company not use this?