Pretty much everyone has heard of the name Google before. If you haven’t, well it’s safe to say you’ve been living under a rock for the past 15 years. We know them as the go to search engine for traversing the interwebs, checking our email, and even chatting with friends and family over their Hangouts App.
For those of us that are into social media (which is pretty much everyone these days), we also know them as a great way to connect with friends, family, and colleagues using Google Plus.
Google does a lot of things, and does them pretty darn well. However did you know Google has amazing tools made specifically for businesses too? It’s called Google Apps for Business, and is honestly one of the most useful tools in arsenal of many businesses.
Large Suite of Tools
Google Apps for Business is a suite of software applications developed by Google for businesses, in order to make it easy for teams to communicate and collaborate together efficiently.
Included in Google Apps is a large suite of tools that covers pretty much every task imaginable. Some of the more notable ones include:
- Gmail – is email for your business. Google Apps Email allows you to create custom email addresses and accounts for your company in just a few clicks.
- Google Hangouts – provides voice, video, and text chat for your business. No matter where you are, you’ll always stay connected with your team on Google Hangouts.
- Google Calendar – works to make scheduling for teams dead simple. Using Google Calendar, you can schedule events, reminders, and notifications for your team, keeping everyone on the same page.
- Google Drive – is the personal cloud storage for your business. Store and share files with your team on the fly.
- Google Docs – is your word processor on the web. Docs provides collaborative word processing for teams. Comment about, chat with and edit documents in real time anywhere you have a web browser.
- Vault – allows you to archive and manage your gmail emails as well as Google Hangouts chat logs. You can easily search and export your company’s data whenever you want.
While these certainly aren’t all the apps included in the Google Apps for Business suite, they are the ones we think you’ll find most useful over time.
Easy on the Wallet
Surprisingly enough, for all these amazing features and tools, Google Apps for Business is very affordably priced, especially for businesses. Google offers businesses two plans to choose from. The first plan is only $5 USD per user per month, with the second being $10 per user per month. So what’s difference?
The $5 plan includes all the apps and features of Google Apps, including 30GB of online storage space, as well as file syncing and sharing among users. The second plan for $10 however includes everything from the first plan, with the main difference being instead of only 30GB of online storage, you get unlimited along with Google Vault.
Just to be clear, this isn’t just paying $5/month or $10/month for Google Apps. This is $5/month or $10/month per “user”. Google defines a user as one personalised email address. You can however have “group aliases”, which are included for free and don’t count as a user.
Conclusion
Google Apps is hands down one of the most robust and handy suite of tools for businesses out there today. When it comes to running a business, communication, collaboration, and organisation is very important. With Google apps being synchronised and linked with each other, you get all of these right out of the box.
Google Apps for Business will save you the time and frustration of maintaining all the standardised services that most companies need, while also giving you the additional benefits of much higher reliability and usability.
Here at ChillyBin, we often use Google Apps to collaborate with our team on different projects for our clients. So don’t worry, it’s ChillyBin approved. Don’t wait, take your business to the next level today by signing up for Google Apps for Business!
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