For as much as I bitch about Google I sure do find it to be a useful resource. Today I will talk about intergrating Google Apps with your website. It’s a fairly easy process and shouldn’t take much more than 5-10 minutes. So let’s get started.

What is Google Apps?

Google Apps is a service made by Google which allows you to use your own domain name with a number of Google products. For example instead of logging into gmail.com to check your email you’d log into webmail.yourdomain.com, or mail.yourdomain.com, or whatever. Google Apps includes by default the following:

• Google Mail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Talk
• Google Page Creator

In addition to those included features you can also add on additional modules from third parties. Some are free, some aren’t, but the basic Google Apps default package is free. I’ve seen everything from astrology updates to sports scores to CRM solutions, and beyond.

Flavors

There are three flavors of Google Apps that are available. Each one is designed to support a certain segment of the market.

Family or group

This one is free and includes hundreds of free user accounts. I honestly don’t know the exact number as I’ve made accounts ranging in size from 3 people to over 500 and not had any problems at all. This includes all of the default modules mentioned above. The email is capped at the usual (and growing) Gmail limit. In other words you have plenty of email space. Support is good if not a little slow, but that’s part of what you deal with when everything is done via email

Small Business and Enterprise

This features the same as the Family or Group accounts except the email is set to 25GB and there is a 99.9% uptime guarantee for the email service. Normally Gmail doesn’t offer any kind of uptime guarantee, but that doesn’t overly concern me. After all it is pretty rare that you can’t get into your Gmail (or other Google account). Support is available via phone. I’ve never had to work with them for support on a Small Business account so I can’t speak to speed or accuracy of their support staff. There is a cost of $50.00 per account per year for this flavor of the service.

Non-profit and schools

This has the same features as the family or group accounts, but also adds Extensibility API functions as part of the basic setup. This allows you to more easily integrate Google Apps into your current technology.

I still don’t get the point of it…

Suppose you wanted to give each and every one of your friends and family a free name@yourdomainname.com email address, but couldn’t due to size limitations. With Google apps you can.

Suppose you wanted to be able to share documents between several collaborators all of them working on the documents, saving, making changes and more at the same time via the internet. With Google apps you can.

Suppose you wanted a company wide calendar that can be shared via the internet with each person being able to edit and control their own entries. With Google apps you can.

How hard is it to setup?

Very easy. Of course I’ve done it 100 times if I’ve done it once, but in all honesty it is very easy. Here I’ll even help you out. These instructions are based on the Home edition.

Step 1

Go to the Google Apps homepage and click the “Get Started” button (currently in the upper right corner). This will take you to a page that allows you to select the edition of Google Apps you are signing up for. Most people can get away with the “Standard (free) Edition”

Step 2

Select the edition you want to use, in this case “Standard”. It will take you to another page that looks like:

If you already have your own domain fill out the information on the right side. If not read the left and decide if you want to get one. If you don’t have your own domain you won’t be able to use Google Apps.

Step 3

Fill out the information that is required. Make sure to give yourself enough email boxes as requesting more has potential to be an annoyance. Also make sure you write down the administrator username and password because without them your life as a Google Apps user isn’t going to be long.

Step 4

Log into your administrator account by going to google.com/a/your_domain_name_here.com/net/org/etc and on the left hand side put in the administrator name and password you used in step 3. This should take you to your administration panel where you can begin adding users, setting up the sub-domains and other things.

Things to consider

You will need to be able to access and manipulate things like your Mail Exchange records, and DNS records in order for Google Apps to work properly. Basically you will be creating DNS records that point things like webmail.yourdomain.com to your Google Apps account and MX records that will route your email to the Gmail servers.

If you are unable, or uncomfortable doing this type of thing most hosts will gladly do it for you if you just request it. During the activation process in Google Apps you’ll be given instructions on what settings to use. Be sure to save that information for future reference.

I hope you’ve found this article useful. If you have any trouble with Google Apps leave a comment in this article and I will see if there is anything I can help you out with.

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Tags: email, gmail, google, google apps how to, tutorial