Ok, first question, you own the domain right? Before you consider setting up your e-mail addresses, make sure you own your domain. If you have any questions about domains and how email relates to your domain, etc, read the Take Control of Your Domain series in this blog.
Using Google Apps for your Domains (GAFYD) to manage your medium to small organization’s e-mail is fairly easy and low-maintenance when everything is working as it should.
1. Google Apps for your domains is free. There is a paid version, but we have found that the free version is featuresque and more than sufficient for our email needs. If you don’t have a good techie on staff in your organization, you might consider using the paid version as it comes with … you guessed it … timely tech support. The paid version is currently $50 per year per address, which can be a cumbersome cost if you are just starting your organization or business, but compared to other services (you’re looking at around $10/mo per address) it is actually an economical alternative and you get a lot for your money.
2. E-mail account set-up is easy. The GAFYD Dashboard is easy to navigate and easy to understand. The instructions are excellent, and if you run into trouble, the extensive GAFYD forum system has the answers to pretty much any question you can come up with. Usually it takes about an hour and a half to set up the google apps email — a little more or a little less depending on how long it takes for the system to grab the changes. Much of this time is spent setting up your “partnerpage” just how you want it to look. This is the page people in your organization can use to access all the google services associated with your GAFYD account. Our vanilla partner page is: http://partnerpage.google.com/xprtcreative.com — you can totally customize your page with your organizational / business colors and logo to further your organizational branding internally.
3. The online help is well put together and pretty extensive. The help area has tutorials, walk throughs and instructions that show how to do everything from e-mail lists to switching from your old email to gmail.
4. It’s easy to tie in with Google Analytics and all the other cool Google tools (such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc) - so if you ever want to track your site stats or even use adwords at some point, you’re already in the system and everything is connected. … very helpful to lay the foundation for organizational growth.
5. You can easily set up email lists. Basically you can say — ok, here’s this new address, info@mybusiness.com — and it’s not a real address, but basically a forwarding mechanism. You add any e-mail you want to this email list, and then whatever email(s) you put in the list — those are the e-mails that actually get the stuff that comes to info@mybusiness.com. The only drawback to this is that you can’t reply from info@mybusiness.com, so that’s something to keep in mind if it matters to you.
Some people like to use their old email addys and forward the new ones, and some people like to use the new e-mail addresses and forward old addys to the new address. Just a matter of preference for you and your business processes, and how it all fits together in your strategic plan.
6. Gmail is independent of your hosting. Another bonus is when you decide to get your website going, it makes it easier for your future web developers to have an email system that is not associated with your host server. So you can change nameservers easily (change hosting companies) and keep gmail as your email without the fuss of transferring to a new email system. That may be more geek than you probably need to know at this point.
That’s enough novel for one post, or maybe it is just a novel idea?!! Ahh, I think I need some sleep. Time flies when you’re having fun.
Just my 2¢ anyway!
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