Google Apps for your sites

What is Google Apps?
Google apps is free/paid service from Google for webmasters. There are different services and cost for all services. We will talk about only for webmasters.

To get the best of Google apps you need complete DNS management . If not then you can’t use all services. Lets start by hitting Google Apps.

Now you are at Google Apps homepage. You can find 3 types of solutions. Choose Businesses and employees

Now click on get started. You will see option for free and paid versions. If you need more features and got lot of money to spend then choose paid version, I am using free version at this Time. Then Sign up for any version you want. I will guide you to free version as I don’t need paid features this time. After it you will be asked for your domain name. If you don’t have domain name then this guide is not for you. Enter your domain name that you want to be with Google Apps and hit Get Started. Then you need to fill simple form. If you are webmaster then you are used to it. After filling form you can get you mail address from Apps that will use to manage your account. Now your account is ready for you.

Start Page.
This is page where all content can get one place. Make it like a portal. Users can select what content they want to show when they are logged in there. Admin just setup header and color scheme.

E-mail.
Get your E-mail address on your own domain name.This thing I love most. I get my mail address on my own domain. Everyone like professional mail address. I am using admin[@]wmrzone.com as my mail address here. It same as any Gmail account but I have my own mail address. To get a mail address you need to change Mail Exchange (MX) records. Most of people have cPanel this time. You can get instruction for it in your Google Apps admin panel.

Chat.
Chat is another good feature that allow you to chat in Google Talk. Most of people use MSN or Yahoo this time. But Gtalk allow you to chat form your business mail address. I am not using it, I am better with yahoo.

Calendar.
This tool is useful if you want to share event and get members updated by telling what going on at your business. If you have small amount of member then it might be just waste of time.

Docs.
If allows to share and store documents online for your business. Same as calendar, only useful for big groups and organizations.

Sites.
Its a new tool in Google Apps. It allows you to make team website where you can have videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, text etc in one place.