Every startup I’ve been a part of has gone through that, “what are we going to do for email?” stage. It used to be very simple. Those with the technical experience would setup a pop or imap server along with SMTP. Problem solved. However, eventually someone would need to access their e-mail via the Web so next would come a webmail application such as SquirrelMail. Maybe next, the biz types would need a calendar so along comes something like php-Calendar. But, before you know it, those biz types see a couple of folks walking around with Blackberries and they’re off to the IT department with their list of feature demands. The next thing you know, the company is sporting an exchange server and suddenly they’re locked into the Microsoft path.
I’ve seen some iteration of this pattern happen at almost every company I’ve worked for. This first thing I realize is that I’ve worked at too many startups. After that, I realize that I’m going to face these same problems with Webcraft Studios. However, short of Microsoft releasing the entire code base under the GPL, I will never deploy an Exchange server for Webcraft. Meanwhile, I must find a strong groupware solution. My exploration has shown me that things are very different now. The playing field is not the same!
Looking for a feature rich solution with maximum mobility, I setup a Google Apps account. The package is impressive. Here’s what I’ve explored so far:
- Webmail: I have pure @webcraftstudios email running through a webmail interface exactly like Gmail. The only webmail client I’ve ever used that I’ve preferred to the Gmail interface is Zimbra, and that’s mostly personal preference. Google also offers fantastic spam filtering. If you prefer a traditional mail client, such as Thunderbird, you can still pop in and get your email.
- Calendar: I’ve only recently fallen in love with Google Calendar. I started using it with my primary Gmail account about 6 months ago. Sharing calendars between Webcraft accounts is smooth and easy. However, I’ve found sharing calendars between Webcraft accounts and Gmail accounts to have some slight limitations. It’s a minor point, but it makes it harder for me to keep my personal calendar and my business calendars happy.
- Custom Start: I avoided setting up customizable home pages for a long time. Finally, when tasked with designing MyGaia, I ended up exploring Pageflakes, Netvibes, and iGoogle. In the end, the “killer app” that kept me coming back to iGoogle was the Twitter applet. Once hooked, I started finding many other useful applets. I was pleased to see that the bulk of functionality offered in iGoogle is available as a custom Webcraft Studios branded start page. There are some extra features beyond iGoogle, such as customizing the look of the start page. However, some basic features seem to be missing, such as the ability to manage multiple tabs.
- Documents: As expected, yet another awesome Google webapp customized for your domain. The suite began as Writely (I believe) and includes a word processor, spreadsheets, and presentation tool. It also allows for document sharing. Unlike the Calendar, sharing a document with a gmail user seems to work fully.
- Chat: We definitely live in the world of too many chat clients. I personally use the desktop app, Pidgin, to manage my overwhelming and unorganized list of contacts spread across too many accounts. Still, it is nice to be able to have a Webcraft branded chat account for every user. It’s also nice that both the webmail and custom start pages have snazzy google chat webapps.
There are a few other bells and whistles I have yet to explore:
- Sites: I’ve never used Google Sites for anything serious. I did toy with the interface and found it to be brilliantly easy for managing a website. Maybe some day this tool might be useful to me.
- Google App Engine: It looks as though Google offers a Web app platform to do some seriously neat things. I don’t have the cycles to invest into exploring this options, but if you want to, start here.
- Partner Service: Finally, there are a number of “partner services”. The most prominent is a CRM called Sales Force. If you want to explore, there’s a slew of others.
Excitingly, I’m still finding more and more options for expanding what I can do online via Google Apps. I’m running into very few limitations along the way. All of the functionality I’m enjoying so far is completely free. The suite of tools is absolutely fantastic.
I have not had time to explore it, but the only competitive collection of tools that I am aware of are the Zoho tools. I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who’s used both Google Apps and Zoho extensively.
There is one minor draw back to both Google Apps and Zoho - all of your data is stored on servers owned and operated by a third party. There’s good reason for a significantly large company - or a company with sensitive data - to avoid using a hosted solution. For everyone else, these solutions mean less cost and less hassle.
At this point, I highly recommend Google Apps to any startup. In fact, I will be recommending it to many of my clients.
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