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The top 11 reasons to use Google Apps

When I start to wax lyrical about Google Apps and peoples eyes start glazing over, I find myself going into this litany about the top 10 (actually, 11) reasons they should convert to Google Apps.

So I thought I would share them with you so you can become a Google fundamentalist just like me!

By offering low upfront costs, reduced overall risk, instant global reach and access to enterprise-level software solutions, Google Apps provides a compelling opportunity for every organization. Those who capitalize on it will reap significant immediate benefits.

1. Eliminate email hassles instantly. No more outages, lost mail, spamming, phishing, viruses, security breaches.
2. Reduce costs. Eliminate the hardware, software, maintenance, upgrades, and services associated with your current environment.
3. Enable collaboration for everyone, from anywhere. Access and collaborate on all your documents and spreadsheets from anywhere in the world via a web browser.
4. Get everyone on the same page. Bring all your key information together in one central, easy-to-use, searchable location.
5. Reduce IT overload. Google handles all technical aspects, freeing up your team to focus on other projects, and allowing you to reduce your online communication and collaboration costs to one low monthly fee.
6. Instantly increase the productivity, knowledge, teamwork, and communication capabilities. Provide instantly accessible tools, including Web-based business class email, online document management, online calendars, blogs, wikis, etc. to your business and your team.
7. Make partnering and out-sourcing more efficient. Create a platform that can seamlessly support virtual ad-hoc teams (without the intervention of an “administrator”), thereby quickly reducing your costs.
8. Increase your peace of mind. With Google’s hosted, fast, safe, and secure file storage, you never have to worry about losing critical business information. You also never have to worry about scalability – Google apps will support any number of users who can be added at any time.
9. Get automatic versioning. Any change to any information in a Google document or spreadsheet creates a new version of the information. Even if a document or spreadsheet is being authored by many users simultaneously, none of the information will ever get lost. If any change is unacceptable, the contents of it can be quickly rolled back to any of its previous states with a couple of clicks.
10. Take advantage of continuous improvement. All Google Apps updates are immediately distributed to all customers. This means that you always have the latest and greatest features immediately available for use in your organization – without doing a thing.
11. New hires are already using this technology. People entering the workforce today have lived and breathed the web since they were in high school. If you don’t provide company endorsed solutions, they will end up using tools that are available on the open Internet until you do.

Moving to the Internet is inevitable. The type of functionality provided by Google is going to be as integral to running a business as e-mail has become, and you would never consider running a business today without email.

“Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home”

As a user (or potential user) of Google Apps, you no doubt make extensive use of email every single day. So you would be well-advised to take a look at a new book called “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home“.

Coincidentally, I was reading Send on the weekend, and a review of the book by the always amusing Dave Barry appeared in the New York Times Book Review. So instead of me trying to explain the book, I’ll let Dave do it in his unique way:

I’ve become so dependent on e-mail that I sometimes wonder how we ever got by without it. Imagine, for example, how useful it would have been for P aul Revere. Instead of having to climb onto a horse in the middle of the night and ride through Massachusetts spreading the alarm, he could have simply whipped out his BlackBerry, fired off a quick message to the patriots in Lexington and Concord, then gone to sleep (unless he also had TiVo).

Of course there might have been problems. Since Revere was typing with his thumbs, his e-mail probably would have said something like, “teh nritish are cming.” As a result the recipients might not have grasped the urgency of the message. The Concord patriots might have assumed it was mainly intended for the Lexington patriots, while Lexington might have assumed Concord was going to handle it, and we would still be British subjects today. I’m not saying that would be a bad thing; I’m just saying it was not what Revere meant to accomplish.

E-mail, for all its efficiency, often fails to achieve its intended result; a vague or carelessly worded message can cause major problems — personal, legal and financial — for senders and receivers. Helping you avoid these problems is the goal of “Send,” an informative, entertaining, thorough and thoughtful book. The authors are media veterans — David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor of The New York Times; Will Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books — with extensive, and not always positive, experience sending and receiving e-mail. They summarize their essential message in two rules: “Think before you send” and “Send e-mail you would like to receive.”