Google apps for email

[Consultant sea]

Anyone use Google apps for an email host? Does it work the same as a normal host and is it easy to transfer my business email addresses over to Google? I see the price is £33 per year and that includes all Google apps for business features.

Anyone used any of this before or have any experiences or advice?

 

[MartBrooks]

Google apps generally works quite well. You can import your contacts. I know of some people who've had compatibility problems with Office documents. YMM, of course, V.

 

[HostThree]

I use Google Apps for every single Domain I've got, you don't need to go for the business account you can use the free version if you like it's enough for most businesses.

 

[Jay2044]

We use Google apps and have not had any problems in the last year.

Google also make Google sync (free download), which allows you to sync to a Blackberry, making it similar to Blackberry Enterprise server. Google sync also sets up your Outlook account and keeps it synchronised as well as giving you an import option from your old mail account. Beware of uploading gigabytes of old mail though as that will take some time, better to keep old mails archived as a PST file if you can.

For £33/mailbox it is an excellent service and much less hassle than running an exchange environment.

I would recommend it for SMEs that want the functionality of synchronisation without the cost/complicatioin of Exchange.

 

[Maxvel]

google apps are very useful for your business, especially if it's internet business

 

[Consultant sea]

What information would I need from my fasthosts reseller to transfer my domain emails to Google and complete the switch?

 

[adxba]

Couldn't recommend Google Apps more highly, we use it ourselves and quite a few of our clients, traditionally used to use either pop3 accounts or an exchange server have moved over to it with minimal fuss.

If you have people in your business that already use a mail client such as outlook, obviously you can set it up to work with google, including calendar syncing etc.

The free version has quite a few features missing, such as the outlook plug in, that most likely you could live without, but do add to the usability. You also get proper Google support if you pay, and additional storage space.

The main thing you need to bear in mind is that you will need access to the mx / dns settings of your domain name to point them to the right location, basically enabling your mail to be directed to google.

If you need a hand setting it up let us know, we could also get you a bit of a discount on the £33 a user per year as well. We could also give you a 30 days trial if that helped.

Out of interest what do you use currently?

 

[HostThree]

What information would I need from my fasthosts reseller to transfer my domain emails to Google and complete the switch?

You can do it by just changing the MX entry in your web hosting control panel.

 

[adxba]

You can do it by just changing the MX entry in your web hosting control panel.

As HostThree says, you don't physically transfer the host to google, your website is still hosted by the same company it has been [FastHosts by the sounds of things] but you change your mx entry to tell any servers trying to send mail to your domain that the mail should be redirected to google.

Then when you send an email through Google, it sends the email through its servers but with your domain on it, so any replies come back through your hosting

 

[Soul_Survivor]

I've also been using the free Google business apps for well over a year and am very pleased with it, I try to reccomemnd to everyone I know running an SME and even those just using it personally.

Also works very well if you are running an andriod based phone, snyc all your contacts and diary between the two so you never lose them! I don't have th esnyc to Outlook but very easy to export contacts from thw web mail into Outlook everynow and then. you can have mutliple google accounts on most Adriod phones as well if you want to merge personal and business mails

Changing the domain over is very easy, they actually have specific instructions for all the main domain registrations companies like 123-reg etc.

 

[Jay-UK]

does a job but also look at Microsofts BPOS which has nearly all the functionality of there fat client office apps.

With Office 365 also about to explode - it is one platform to look at.

I have done a number of large scale deployments for both BPOS and G Apps and whilst G Apps has it's place - BPOS and the like have the edge on functionality.