Google Apps - Free email, pages, spreadsheets and more for your site

Anyone here use google Apps? If you don't you should. Some of the features are:

Email
Use Gmail with your domain. Your email address is yourname@yourdomain.com, and you get to use the GMail WYSIWYG editor to create emails. It has powerful Spam protection also. In all my time of using Gmail (With and without google Apps) I've never had any Spam go unfiltered. Another feature of Gmail is conversations. If you've replied to an email, and someone's relied back, and so-on and so-forth, you can view all emails in one window, and they appear as one email, instead of cluttering your inbox. Also, if you're replying to an email, or reading it, if the person replies, a message will popup and you can view their reply right away.

Chat
You can also use Google chat to chat to people with email accounts at your domain. Google Chat is a Instant Messenger program that usually allows you to chat with other Gmail users. In this case however, you chat with other people from your domain. Google Chat also has the additional feature of notifying you when you have new mail on Gmail, and allowing you to access it on-the-spot.

Pages
Google also have their own WYSIWYG Web Editor, you can choose from a variety of templates, then create, move, edit and delete elements such as text, images etc. anywhere on the page. Great for beginners at HTML who want their site to look professional!

Docs & Spreadsheets
Pretty much Google's online answer to Microsoft Word and Excel! You can create advanced online documents and spreadsheets, and save them! Great when you need to create Documents/spreadsheets on-the-go, on computers that don't have any good office programs, or in internet cafes

What's even better, is you can either access them via google, or point them at your own domain/subdomain! E.g. for your email, you can access it via mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com, or email.yourdomain.com!

If you're having trouble configuring it to work with your website, don't worry! Google has specific walkthroughs for many different webhosts!
To sign up, go to http://www.google.com/a/
Note: It takes some time for Google's servers to update, and get your domain working 100%, but this should only take a few hours if you configured it correctly.

 

 

 

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Yes, i use it a while, and it is an excellent set of web applications. Right now i only use the email, chat and calendar with very good results, i dont you try the pages but i'm interested to use it in the future, what is your opinion about this????

Best regards,

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Google rocks! Gmail is 50 times better than yahoo, the only reason yahoo is surviving is cause of prior market domination. wait a while and google will change all that. to pump up ure gmail get greasemonkey it will change ure life.

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Yeah i am a fan of google, they provide nearly all the services you could want online all in one account. It's great for guys constantly swapping computers and also for people that need word processing software but don't have access to it. Google's apps are most of the time high quality, even the web based ones. You'd think how was that possible to do with web coding but google have put the time and effort into making high quality, free web apps for convenience.
It's an awesome alternative to the usual software you normally use and is great when you need to access something that is at home (with some specific ways/services google offers)

-HellFire

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I guess I never really thought to check out apps other than checking my gmail and using Google search. I do actually use a lot of Microsoft Office applications and I do use trillian for my chatting. But I just don't seem to do it all at once... I think lately it has been astahost, photoshop, and dreamweaver. Ok, yes I do much other surfing, but it just didn't relate to google.

I could always play with the options once I am already logged into my gmail account. I do understand the importance of multiple users and multiple PC usage. I implanted a homepage full of links just for other PC usage... that and laziness to not type www.

As for email, I have almost all of the free ones you can figure... It was always convenient to always add a new address for some other reason... I don't use one so much anymore that it handles all of the spam it seems! *laugh* But my main is gmail... it seems a bit more professional out of them all... I guess!

Web editing was always taken care of using my dreamweaver, or frontpage editors. But after reading a lot of these posts, I think it would be a good start to my new website to start adding on apps that I enjoy at least! I will have to see what it can offer me.

- skedad -

 

 

 

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I use Google services for the following things:
- iGoogle for homepage
- GMail for primary email address
- Google Docs and Spreadsheets for documents that need to be transferred from home to school (although support for Microsoft Office 2007 is not implemented yet)
- Google Webmaster Tools for keeping track of my websites
- Google Bookmarks for keeping global bookmarks
- Google Translate for tranlation purposes
- Google Earth for maps (although Google Maps in browser sometimes)
- Google Video for searching of YouTube and other videos
- Picasa for basic photo editing
- Toolbar to enhance Gecko-based browsers

And of course Google Search for general searching!

Here are my opinions on other Google products:
- Google Calendar: With this and Google Mail, these two applications have the power to take over Microsoft Outlook. It may not be as powerful, but it is certainly good enough for most people. I don't really use Google Calendar as I do not find that I need to use Calendar applications a lot
- Google Talk: It might be good for people who have lots friends that use Google-based products, but I have like 1 or 2, so that is unnecessary for me
- Google Notebook: I plan to try this in the future.
- Google Web History: Yes I use this. I have it to "Searches only" for privacy reasons. It is quite good if you need to find something that you searched for few months back.

There are some other ones, like Google Ride Finder, but those are still in BETA stage and I don't know if they are useful to me or not.

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I use all of them & others, they are excellent especially Google Mail (GMail). I use the SMTP GMail server for my email (My web host doesn't allow SMTP servers but they have a POP3).

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I use Google Email (gmail) but I have it set up for POP3 on my web browser so I rarely ever go to the actuall site (unless I am searching for a website). I dont really need anything else. I dont need instant chat and I dont need HTML site builders. I would log into google more if they offered more things I needed. They dont have a very good support forum which makes me wounder about ever getting google ad-sense on my site or ad-words to advertise for my site.
I havent ever heard of googles you@yourdomain.com email but I may need to look into that.
Thanks,
Sparkx

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