This real case is about the owner of the small business who, luckily, was in-tune with the ever changing technology and saw the opportunity to save money and increase productivity.
The owner, let’s call her Mary, managed a staff of 75 and was struggling with the following problems:
- It costs have gone up despite the recession
- Her company was using POP3 email and she was constantly juggling email between her iPhone, a laptop and her office desktop
- Sharing files between employees was a nightmare
- Calendar sharing was out of the question
- As the company grew, backups were a daily challenge and called for expensive upgrades
Mary contracted a local IT provider that had only one answer – Microsoft Exchange; a costly answer that required not only new hardware and software but also a boat load of extra hours for conversion, administration and training of the staff.
Mary contacted me and I offered a simple (almost free of charge) solution – Google Apps. Google – in their infinite wisdom (I mean that literally) presents an alternative to what the IT company suggested; an alternative that can be setup in minutes and solves all the problems listed above.
All you have to do is make some simple modifications to your domain and email setup. Here’s what Google Apps offers in terms of email:
Email, IM, voice and video chat
Each user gets 25 GB of email and IM storage (50 times the industry average).
Anytime, anywhere access to your email
Gmail is securely powered by the web, so you can be productive from your desk, on the road, at home and on your mobile phone, even when you’re offline.
Sync with Outlook & BlackBerry
Get the benefits of Apps on familiar platforms
Search and find emails instantly
Spend less time organizing email and find emails quickly with Google-powered search for your inbox.
Get less spam
Powerful Gmail spam filtering helps you stay focused on what’s important. Postini filtering lets you customize your spam protection.
These are all free and very easy to setup. On top of all these, several other applications deserve to be mentioned, like:
- Google Calendar Agenda management, scheduling, shared online calendars and mobile calendar sync.
- Google Docs Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Work online without attachments.
- Google Groups User-created groups providing mailing lists, easy content sharing, searchable archives.
- Google Sites Secure, coding-free web pages for intranets and team managed sites.
- Google Video Private, secure, hosted video sharing.
How does Google do all this without charging? Well – there is a charge of $50 per user per year which for Mary amounted to about $3750 per year. This only in the event that 25GB of email is not sufficient for your users. Compare this and the cost of implementing what the IT company proposed and you’ll see the immediate benefits.
How is it possible that Google can do this? It’s gotta be some kind of conspiracy theory abut I cannot figure it out yet…When I do I’ll let you know. In the meantime, save yourself a bunch of money and a whole lotta of headaches with these awesome Google Apps and you won’t regret it. The link to this great time and money saver is: http://www.google.com/apps/
Cost Savings for Mary
She opted for the free version of the Google Apps and saved a little over $43,000 this year alone. Huge savings for a small company. Maybe she can give some bonuses to her hard working staff instead of throwing them away for unnecessary technologies.
I use Google Apps every day no matter what computer I use. In fact right now I am writing this from an Internet Café. In the Philippines! Via email. Totally secure, totally sweet…
Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of
Design by Satori Inc. &
Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line.
He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on
Twitter. Read more from this author
