Google Apps launches today for small business, families, schools and maybe our company.

Google finally announced their Apps bundle last night. Essentially they’ve rolled their calendar, docs, spreadsheet, email, IM and web publishing products into one hosted bundle with 10 gigs of storage and 24 hour phone support. Schools and families get it for free and small businesses pay $50 per account per year – but there is a free trial until the end of April.

We’re looking for a few little tech solutions for our company at the moment: email from our URL, file sharing, shared calendar, a wiki. I’m not sure if Google Apps with match exactly what we’re after but generally it looks like a pretty compelling package for a small business – especially if you can sign up for this in place of Microsoft Office and save the purchase and upgrade costs. A PowerPoint product seems to be all they’re missing really but I’ll bet Google announce a product launch or an acquisition of one of the existing tools before the snow in Toronto melts.

UPDATE: Mathew Ingram has a good post about Google Apps over here. “To me, the missing piece is still some kind of offline app that will cache documents for when Internet access isn’t available, like Zoho is doing. Google’s Office suite (let’s call it what it is) might be fine when you’re at HQ with a T1 line, but what about when you’re in a regional office in Poughkeepsie, or on the road?”

While I’m talking about tech tools for a small office I should mention SpanningSync again – the little iCal:Google Cal syncing product I tried out a few weeks ago. The conclusion: A+. This little tool makes my life a heck of a lot easier. No more logging into Google Cal every time I want to add an event to our shared company calendar – just pop it in iCal and hit ‘sync’. I thoroughly recommend this for anyone using iCal.

1 Comment

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  duncan February 24, 2007 at 12:45 am

  It’s still “speculation” but here’s the scoop on a rumoured Google PowerPoint clone.