VoiceSync.ca Cheap Voicemail to email and Fax to email: Google Apps Product Overview

Google Apps Product Overview

As a Google Apps solution provider one of the most valuable services Voicesync.ca can provide is helping our customers understand how the features of each Google application can solve our customers’ everyday problems.

This page provides a guided tour of short videos and other resources that will teach you the basics of Google Apps and point you to some tips and tricks shared by customers and Googlers. The “IT Perspective” and “User Perspective” sections details how Google Apps benefits these different audiences.

General Product Overview

IT Perspective – The late 90′s was a time of great enthusiasm for the potential of leveraging the internet for corporate benefit. Bandwidth limitations and storage costs among other factors led to the end of ‘dot com’.

Overnight IT departments reverted from innovation centers to cost centers. Over the past several years IT has been told to cut costs, keep critical systems running and make sure the company is covered in case of disaster or lawsuit.

Google Apps has a $50 price point, 99.9% uptime, and redundant data centers. What is the core function of your company? Is it managing email? If not, are you happy with the ratio of resources applied to serving strategic initiatives vs managing your email infrastructure?

Some people still fear the notion of someone else hosing their data. Do you run your payroll, 401k and benefits internally? Google’s datacenters have received SAS 70 Type II certification – we’re secure and the auditors will vouch for us. Organizations from Genentech, City of Washington DC, to Midwest Realty Ventures and 2nd Wind Exercise and thousands (millions?) more have made the jump. Shouldn’t everyone?

User Perspective – Ten years ago your access to the best technology was at the office. Now it’s not unlikely that your home computer or device is better than anything they give you at the office. And consumer applications such YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter change the way you create, store and share information. What advances have been made at work? Have your email, word processing and collaboration applications improved at the same rate?

Google Apps is not Google’s version of what already exists.

We’re building on what works well and expanding into the future. Companies that are growing are doing so by maximizing their employee productivity. Ideas such as cross-functional teams, telecommuting and mobility have changed the landscape of the corporate worker. We believe it’s time their toolkits adapt with them. We once used screwdrivers and hammers, we now use power drills and nail guns. We once used client based email and word processing, we’re now ready for the Cloud. We’re ready for Google Apps.

Google Apps Overview (1:58)

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Gmail

IT Perspective – Users get frustrated when they reach their email storage quota, typically set at 1GB or less, because they’re used to seeing ads selling 1TB hard drives for $100. What they don’t understand is how much more complex adding storage is than simply buying more hard drives. This isn’t the case with Gmail, which includes 25GB of space for each user, so users can keep all of their important messages without any burden on IT.User Perspective – Gone are the days of ‘You have exceeded your mail quota, you cannot send mail until you delete mail from your mailbox’, resulting in deletion of emails that later turn out to be important. But Gmail isn’t just about more storage. Gmail also includes Google Search across all of your email, so you can find that email Nancy sent last year about the TPS report (search for “Nancy TPS”). This helps you find information much faster than sorting by sender and trying to remember subject line or the date it was sent. And Gmail’s other features – like labels, message threading and integrated text, voice and video chat – help you get more done with your time. Gmail can take a bit of getting used to, but once you have the hang of it, you’ll never look back.

Gmail Overview (3:31)

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Google Calendar

IT Perspective – If your employees’ computers can run a browser, then they can run Google Calendar. Google Calendar makes group calendaring easy with resource scheduling, shared calendars, integration with Microsoft Outlook™ and support for easy mobile access.

User Perspective – Trying to find a time when a group of co-workers are all free? Check the box next to each co-worker’s name, see each calendar appear alongside your own, and scan for the empty space. No more guessing only to find out that people have existing conflicts. Google Calendar is accessible from any computer with a browser and is available from many different mobile phones, so you can manage your schedule from anywhere.

Google Calendar Overview (0:37)

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Google Sites

IT Perspective – Technology can foster user collaboration and innovation. Unfortunately, users often don’t understand that deploying collaboration technology typically needs to be done in a clearly architected way to ensure the infrastructure will meet their performance demands. But Google Sites is different, because it’s hosted in Google’s data centers and requires no new infrastructure. And when employees want to invite new collaborators to their project site, you don’t need to worry about getting more client access licenses. And you can choose to invite anyone with an email account to view or collaborate with you.

User Perspective – You want IT to build a project management repository for you, but it’s asking for a cost / benefit justification for the thousands of dollars of hardware and software that would be required. So instead you fall back to taking notes on a whiteboard or paper, only to find them erased, misplaced or just hard to search and share with colleagues. Google Sites allows you to maintain information online – meeting notes, project plans, partners portals and more. None of this requires any additional IT support and it’s as easy as creating a document. Information in your sites is always available and searchable to easily reference in the future.

Google Sites Overview (2:26)

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Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations)

IT Perspective – It’s a money-saving best practice to purchase licenses of Microsoft Project™ or Visio™ only for those users who need it, so why do you purchase the entire Microsoft Office™ suite for each user who may only need to create or read a Word™ document or Excel™ spreadsheet? Finance and Legal may need the advanced features of Office, but the majority of employees can do their jobs with Google Docs – which includes documents, spreadsheets and presentations – saving you the cost of expensive Office licenses for them.

User Perspective – What sounds better? Creating a spreadsheet, emailing it to several coworkers for their feedback and spending hours rebuilding the master spreadsheet, or creating your spreadsheet, sharing it as an online Google Doc and allowing co-workers to contribute their edits directly to the master document without you having to reconcile their changes? The time you save by not hassling with attachments or having to deal with multiple copies of the same file lets you get to the priorities that you never had time for before.

Google Docs Overview (2:50)

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Google Video (“YouTube for your domain”)

IT Perspective – Users want you to implement a video storage and retrieval system? Hope you have plenty of budget and a plan to appease frustrated users when storage space runs out. Google Video, which is included with the $50 per user price, is like a private, secure version of YouTube for internal video sharing. There’s no special infrastructure required at all.

User Perspective – Text documentation is the perfect way to train people, assuming they actually read the words. Or maybe your CEO wants to share the latest update with the whole company. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video can communicate a message better than any other format. Google Video works like YouTube, but it’s safe and secure so you can share videos internally within your company.

Google Video Overview (2:26)

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How-to videos for Google Video

Google Talk (text, video, and voice chat)

IT Perspective – Instating messaging is difficult to justify from a cost perspective as a mission critical business tool. Besides, there are free IM clients to choose from, although this does add the concern of people using unsanctioned
software within your environment. With Google Apps, IM is embedded directly within the suite with no additional hardware or software requirements. It’s all under the umbrella of your secure corporate communication
platform.

User Perspective – Email conversations sometimes are just too slow. Why wait several hours for a response you can get in ten seconds? With Google Talk you can chat right from your inbox. Including video and audio chat. Google Talk users can see their colleagues’ status (online, busy, offline), allowing them to send a chat when you need a quick answer, they can even chat as a reply to an email message. And it’s easy to connect with your co-workers, because their IM accounts are connected to their business email accounts.

Google Talk text, voice, and videoo chat overview (1:08)

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Training walkthrough