Google Apps for business makes sense
Forget the fact that more than one million businesses use Google Apps.
Forget the fact that Google Apps will improve your business productivity.
Forget that it is by Google. Forget that Google themselves use Google Apps (that includes Google Documents, Presentations and Slideshows - also online forms etc) to run themselves.
Forget that Google Apps standard edition is essentially free (no usage cost, no license fees, no nothing!).
Forget that you can easily ’slide’ into using Google Apps from your more traditional application services such as email, document creation, spreadsheets and presentation. You can and rather should slowly integrate your current apps while moving to Google Apps e.g. start by using Google Apps Gmail instead of you Express, shift your email accounts from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps in batches. Then you can warm up the company employees into using Google Docs to put together manuals or memos or anything that you use Microsoft Word for. Then you can move onto making Google presentations, putting them online, presenting using Google templates etc. You do not use Google Apps as a one-time, use-all package, it is a highly modular system that you can adapt at your own speed and choosing. You would consider all of this if you manage or work in a company of say 100 or more people that use email, MS Word or Powerpoint on a regular enough basis to get ‘used to it’. If not, you are losing out on a lot of savings by using ‘anything’ other than Google Apps. But like I said, forget that!
You can consider the stability that Google Apps offer. Let the graphs do that talking here.
Google used to offer 99.9 uptime guarantee for Gmail to its Premier members (which comes at a cost). Now, Google is offering the same SLA (Service Level Agreement) to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk.
Also, from Google’s enterprise blog:
…results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn’t the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.
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[...] have been using Google Apps for most of my documentation work, most of my pictures were either uploaded to Picasa, Facebook, [...]