Google Apps is the definition of personalization for your domain providing efficiency, collaboration, and distinctiveness. As always with Google, it is a free service that can be added on to a domain, or if you own your own business or non profit, where you have larger needs, they have a pay-for-service, that offers even more.
If you haven’t read my posts about IMAP and Personal Domains, you may want to read up on them if you haven’t heard of those terms. Click here to sign up to add Google Apps to your own website.
I continue to be amazed at what Google is willing to freely provide, and they even do it in the background, where visitors to your website will never know Google is working behind your web pages. Talk about humility! I could take a lesson from Google on their willingness to take a back seat while consistently providing a great service without any credit. An example: because I’ve enabled Google Apps for TobyLaura.com, Laura and I have personalized e-mail addresses at: tobylaura.com. Google is providing the great e-mail, but their name is never seen in our addresses.
With Google Apps enabled, you get, for free:
100 Google e-mail addresses @yourdomain.com. Each has 6 gig of inbox space. That’s 600 gig of inbox at your disposal!
You can build a free website with 100 megabytes of space. That’s not too much, but hey, it’s free. For comparison, TobyLaura.com is a little more than 500 megabytes. TobyCline.com is made with Google Apps free web page as an example.
A calendar that you can keep private, share with specific individuals, or share publicly on your web page.
A Sites tool, where you and coworkers can work on documents or projects collaboratively.
A Documents page, where you can create Office documents, like Word files, Excel files, spreadsheets, and the like. You can save these to the internet where others can read and see them, or edit them, or they can be downloaded to your computer. Don’t want to spend $400 dollars on Microsoft Office? Employ Google Apps!
Google Chat — through Gmail and through it’s own program. Chat with anyone in the world, for free.
And finally, a start page, where you get a personalized place to start your web surfing experience (make it your home page). It has a place to see if you have e-mail, news articles you’ve selected to see, weather anywhere in the world, and much more that would just bore you talking about it here.
When you own your own domain, you can set up these applications’ address as: docs.yourdomain.com or calendar.yourdomain.com as an example. That way, when I want to check our e-mail, I just type in mail.tobylaura.com and it brings me to our personalized e-mail. It’s so simple and easy.
I also have my old gmail.com address that most everyone I know has for me. I set up all incoming mail to that address to be automatically forwarded to my new address at tobylaura.com This future proofs my e-mail accounts. If I ever want a different address, I can always use Google e-mail to forward to my future, new address.
Even if you don’t plan on using all the features, they are great to have for potential future use. If you own your own domain, sign up for free: it’s a no brainer, and a winner.
If you are new to the web (like me), it may take a little reading in the help pages that Google provides, if you stumble into trouble, or you can e-mail me. Google’s help pages are very good, though. Another reason to sign up for your personal web address through GoDaddy.com is because they are huge and popular. Because of this, Google often provides instructions on how to set up your domain information with specific GoDaddy instructions.
Get Gmail because it is the best e-mail out there.
Get your own domain name before someone takes it.
Enable Google Apps to your domain and you’ll be off and running! If it shows up, click the add below to help support this blog.
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