Increase Business Productivity For Free!
April 3rd, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
Well surprise surprise, the corporate giant that is Google is unveiling free tools at a rate of knots. In addition to the features useful for our personal lives such as Gmail, Book search and finding your house on Google Earth, Google has also launched a variety of free tools which can potentially be very useful for small businesses.
If you don’t yet have a sturdy webmail system for your business domain name (eg: yourbusiness.co.uk) then AeroDesigns can offer corporate strength Microsoft Exchange hosting, but if you don’t need all the bells and whistles that come with Exchange, then you should think about using the free Google Mail Apps service. With this service you can have up to 100 mailboxes (or more if you negotiate) at a whopping 2Gb per box! These email addresses are configured so that they appear from your own domain name and you can administer all your employees email accounts from your Admin panel.
You can find all the new applications over at the Google “About” Page.
So what kind of new features are available? Well if you’re not familiar with the Gmail standard, you sort emails according to a label you give them rather than into folders, this takes a bit of getting used to but has definitely got a shallow learning curve with all the tips and tutorials they offer. You can also link up with their other free tools such as Google Calendar (which you can set to send free SMS text messages to your mobile phone as reminders to events), and Google Docs which allows you to share and collaborate on documents with other employees online.
Google Mail Apps also allows you to store the details of all your contacts in an easily accessible and searchable format. If you use Skype regularly (particularly SkypeOut and SkypeIn) then you can also download a Skype Toolbar for Internet Explorer which highlights telephone numbers that you can call just by clicking on. So to sum up, if you use Google Mail to store your contacts and use Skype, then you just have to navigate to your contact and click their number and Skype will call them for you without having to type the number in. I’d highly recommend Skype for small business users as they offer really cheap landline calls and personally I have found the call quality to be perfect when using broadband (even 512Kb).
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