Google Apps Premier: Week One

For around £2.50 per month per user, we now get sophisticated email which is delivered via the increasingly impressive Googlemail interface. In the background is the Postini service (acquired by Google a couple of years ago) which adds superb spam filtering and virus checking along with other facilities (including a standard footer) I have yet to explore.

We also get the rather nice Google Sites which allows us to set up an ad-hoc intranet. By editing our MX records, I'm able to access the various functions at [function].[domain name]: for example mail.example.com or docs.example.com and even set up a Google Sites web page at www.example.com so that all users can log in and get to the various sections from one central page.

Google Apps includes Google Docs which, frankly, is still pretty rubbish. It will enable us to collaborate on simply formatted documents and presentations before the final version is downloaded and prettied up.

Apps includes a shared Calendar application, built in chat and even the ability to access Apps on your mobile phone (it works beautifully on my Android phone).

It took a bit of setting up, although it was easy enough and most of this was spent in Google Mail setting up filters to help me manage email coming from all my many email accounts. So far it's going exceptionally well: enabling me to keep to my "clear inbox" policy almost entirely. Because it's online, I don't have to worry about viruses and my inbox is not cluttered with Spam because it would have to get past Positini first and then Google's own spam filter. So far, not a single inappropriate message has made it into my inbox. I was able to achieve something similar using Thunderbird and Cloudmark but it took ages every morning to process the crap that came in.

So far so good: I now need to sell my co-director (and technophobe) on it. If he goes for it, then I know we're onto a winner.