Communication is the indisputable core of all healthy, profitable and growing businesses. I have two quick mental exercises for you: First, think about your favorite vendors or business partners right now. What is the number one thing that stands out about them? I'm willing to bet it has to do mainly with efficiency (the result of well-greased inner office communication) and/or the quality of their communication with you. Second, I know this is going to be painful, but think of a few specific customers that have expressed their dissatisfaction with you or your company. Was the dissatisfaction a result of your miscommunication with them? Or was the dissatisfaction a result of a breakdown in your inner office communication/work flow? Communication determines profit. None of us will ever graduate from communication school! We must constantly strive to better our communication skills both inside and outside of our business.
Last month I gave a brief history of Google. This month's article is going to plunge you into the world of Google Apps. Google Apps is a host of business products bundled together to become a backbone of support for your business communications needs. Imagine a world where your email, calendar and commonly used spreadsheets and documents are merged into a single platform that is accessible to you from any computer anywhere in the world. Picture too, that everyone in your office can have access to the same files and calendars that you see and use on a daily basis. Think about the possibilities provided by an inner-office intranet with sites and dashboards and critical information merged together in logical groups. Imagine a single page on your computer that shows you your recent email, upcoming appointments, weather, top news, favorite blogs and live statistical data provided to you in easy to read animated gauges. These are just the tip of the iceburg called Google Apps.
Google Apps is 6 main applications: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Sites, Documents and Videos. These 6 applications work seamlessly together to open up a whole new world of communication possibilities. None of these applications are a new concept. What is new and great, however, is the way each of these components function together. Email can be handled by your phone, web browswer, or through outlook. Calendaring can be handled the same as email. You can control calendar sharing with your co-workers or with your personal acquaintances. Your contacts will stay synced up to your phone or in outlook. If you don't happen to be a web guru, you can use Sites to create your own web pages to help organize company info and create connections across the deferent departments in your business. Documents allow you to share, manage and track changes on commonly used documents. No more emailing out updated revisions of spreadsheets or trying to figure out if you are looking at the "latest copy." Videos allow you to have your own business video portal. You can create and manage training videos, safety videos, product demonstration videos etc.
I often run into businesses that are just using gmail, or only using Google Calendar. Although each of the 6 main Google applications are available as individual components, you will not get the full value of them until you migrate to Google Apps. Migrating completely over to Google Apps is relatively simple for most small to medium sized businesses. The only requirement for getting started with Google Apps is a domain name and access to the domain settings. Google Apps comes in a handful of versions ranging in cost from free to $50 per user per year. You can migrate your old archived email over to Google Apps as well as your existing calendar appointments and contact lists.
For more information on the migration process or how Google Apps can work for your business, please contact me! I would be more than happy to share our experience of migrating to Google Apps and how we are using Google Apps for our sales team.