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Google Apps for Your Business: The Good, the Bad and Ugly

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http://www.entrepreneur.com/technology/gear/article207688.html

Google Apps for Your Business:  The Good, the Bad and Ugly
By Jonathan Blum, Entrepreneur.com
August 2, 2010

In case you hadn't noticed, it's not Bill Gates' world any more. Sure, Microsoft remains the dominant office software provider, with 450 million deployed users, according to data from the company. But its downcoast rival, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, has broken Microsoft's lock on office software products. More than 2 million firms and 25 million users now handle their e-mail, documents and other office tasks using Google's web-based professional office suite, Google Apps.
And for good reason.
Google's office tools offer a mind-boggling array of cloud-based productivity options to even the smallest firms: Essentially everything you do at work is now available anywhere, anytime, from any online connection. Better yet, it's all free for the standard version--or $50 per year per user for the Premier version, which includes additional storage and high-quality, unlimited support.
And Google is just getting started. In April the company quietly overhauled Apps, dramatically changing the user interface and upgrading the core code of the software. The new Apps supports development by third parties though the Google Apps Marketplace.
If you don't have good web access, you are better off working with traditional word processors like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice. But if you use the internet and your firm is not Google Apps-savvy right at this very second, you are making a mistake.
Here are our choices for the great, the not-so-great and the downright awful Google small-business tools:
Great Tools

What's to love: The cornerstone of any small-business venture, Google Apps Gmail supports your company's URL and looks the same from any web browser or mobile device. For example, it instantly turns even an iPod Touch into a work portal. Plus, Gmail has plenty of room for every employee's work e-mail, with 25 GB of storage per user (with a paid Apps account). Employees have complete remote access, and the system requires them to log in to do their work, for total accountability. Gmail conversations are "threaded," unlike most desktop e-mail clients, which means e-mails are grouped by similar subject lines, making it simpler to track intricate, multi-party exchanges.
What's to hate: Google's approach to logging in and managing various e-mail identities is needlessly complicated. Worse, employees often have trouble telling whether they're logged in to the company's virtual e-mail system or their own personal Gmail account. Also, be prepared to be bombarded by ad-supported content. Text ads are Google's main business, so you're pretty much always looking at them. Some may be relevant, but many businesses will be wary about opening their private company e-mails to marketers, even if anonymously.
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Comprehensive review from Entrepreneur.com of the search-engine giant's battery of web-based tools.

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