As a business organization grows beyond a few people, inefficiencies when communicating
and collaborating with each other become more apparent. As the organization is divided
into departments, the need for an efficient and cost effective tools for communication and
collaboration becomes more needed. This is where Google Apps come in.
Google Apps is a collection of various tools like email, shared documents and calendars,
and instant messaging in one unified system. It allows the business organization to use
its own domain name for the email addresses giving it more prestige and credibility when
communicating with someone from outside the company. And using the same email
accounts, the employees may send instant messages or chat to each other and the resulting
conversation is automatically added to the user’s inbox for future reference.
Shared documents is a fairly new concept and the idea behind this is that a document can
be edited in real time by more than one person. All persons authorized to edit the shared
document will always see the latest version of each document. This allows users to edit a
document without needing to attach the document in an email for review. And perhaps the
best thing about shared documents is that everyone sees the latest version everytime.
Users can share and collaborate on making a draft of text documents, spreadsheets and
presentations. It is not recommended though to put elaborate formatting on Google Apps
because it would require higher bandwidth overall, especially that in Bohol, not all users
have access to high bandwidth broadband service. When using Google Apps, users should
focus on the content and when the draft is already final, they can download the document
to a regular office application like OpenOffice or MS Office where they can implement the
required formatting.
In addition to the convenience of real-time collaboration, the documents are always in your
Google Apps account and you don’t have to carry a USB drive everytime. You just need
to access the Internet to download the documents for printing. Also, just recently, Google
Apps allowed users to upload any document so you can also upload the final and formatted
document for safe keeping.
For organizations needing an efficient environment for collaboration within the office to
anywhere in the world, Google Apps is perhaps the best system available that is free and
have the capacity of 7GB per user. If you need a bigger storage, you may upgrade your
whole domain to the premium service to have 25GB capacity plus other premium features.
Combined with the use of your own domain, you can create your own official domain, email
address, chat system and document archive.