Just before I walked out the door to kick off the end of year festivities for 2008, I flicked the switch that ultimatley moved Revium’s email hosting, internal calendering and (some) other systems over to Google. Yep, we had moved to Google Apps.
For those of you who don’t know, Google Apps allows businesses to use the popular tools such as Google Calender, GMail, Sites (and more) in an office environment. In essence, Google Apps is basically an alternative to setting up the Microsoft Exchange infrastructure in house (for shared calender, email facilities). The beauty of Google Apps is that we don’t have to fork out mega bucks to maintain a server in-house. Everything is up in the cloud! 
After what was initially a suggestion for investigation by Mark and Adrian (Our Senior .NET / PHP developers respectively), it didn’t take long before most of the staff had taken a shining to the trial Google Apps account we had set up. The main configuration that was needed was setting up everyones user accounts. Once that was done it was a matter of pointing the Mail Exchange records for the Revium domain over to Google (essentially telling our host that the mail is now managed through Google, not them).
Probably the biggest plus we have noticed internally, is the shared calendaring. We had stuffed about for ages trying to find a suitable office calendar solution, but now with Google Calendar through Google Apps we’re sorted. Moreso, some of the other staff are thrilled about using GMail outside of the office for webmail. (I’ve even spyed a few of the guys using is as thier default mail client in Fluid App – but that’s for another Blog post I’d say).
If you get the chance to check out Google Apps – you should, or chat to me about it. 
Related posts:
- Going, Going, Gone Google.
- Why should a company outsource thier email delivery?
- Advanced Searching in Google
- Google Sidewiki – Another PR nightmare?
- Email source code in MS Outlook
Tags: google
[...] might remember that recently we decided to replace our self hosted email infrastructure with Google apps. We have been using it quite happily for our internal email and calendaring for [...]