Come for the Ride!

If I was setting up a new web company as short as a year ago, I would have had a ton of headache worrying about web hosting, email management, Intranet and communication tools for my team. For my startups, this is on the top of my list for pulling the team together via a virtual office. The chore is still important even today but luckily things are much easier now.

In the older, more expensive days of working together via remote offices, getting people together usually involved MS Exchange or some kind of enterprise email system, VPN’s, central storage, company servers, etc., etc. Needless to say, the upfront investment to getting the basic business necessities were costly and security is a constant concern.

Thanks to broadband and Google, things have gotten a lot easier. Google Apps is something we’re currently using for EasyAutoSales.com and it’s something I highly recommend for other entrepreneurs. One of the major misconceptions is that this service cost money. Yes, you could pay for more storage and more advanced features but you also get a lot through the free service.

One of the best things about Google Apps is that you can get email at your domain.com. Your emails aren’t sent “on behalf of your domain via you@gmail.com” but it actually comes straight from your domain. Not only are you using Gmail which in my opinion has one of the best SPAM blockers and interface; you are getting tons of storage for your emails and the convenience of web based access. Best of all this package has a zero cost vs. an expensive MS Exchange system that will ultimately slow to a deathly crawl as your business grows.

However, in addition to email you are getting other tools to help expand your business.  You have free access to online documents, online spreadsheets and an online equivalent to power point. The latter tool is still pretty weak but it’s only a matter of time before it gets upgraded to be on par with the software it’s mimicking.

So while this post may seem pretty obvious for some, hopefully it will get others to try it out who may have overlooked this free service. At the end of the day, we all just need to get the administrative tasks out of the way so we can focus on what matters, which is the business at hand. Setting up Google Apps only take a few minutes… and it’s another way to save you money and weeks of work shopping for servers, softwares and VPN solutions.