Is Google Ready to Handle Your Business? (Part 2 of 2)

In function 1 of this post, I discussed the communications offerings that Google offers and the role they might play for pocket-sized- and medium-sized businesses. In this follow-up, I will cover their productivity and promotional services, ranging from the productivity suite Google Docs to the free hosted blogging service Blogger. While Google'due south communications tools are mostly quite excellent, their productivity and promotion tools are much more a mixed bag. After the overview of Google's diverse services, then, I'll offer a short assay of how well-suited Google apps are for concern use overall, too as discuss some new tools that might make a large impact in the nearly futurity.

Productivity Apps

Google Docs offers a reasonable culling to costly role suites, although for complex work comes upward short of Microsoft Office or fifty-fifty OpenOffice.org's desktop-based software. Consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software, Docs imports from and exports to all of Microsoft's default formats (although it cannot save to Part 2007's docx format yet).

The word processor is cracking for creating, editing, and viewing short documents, offering a range of formatting options typical to bones give-and-take processing tasks. For longer documents, however, Docs comes up defective: page numbers can only be practical to printed output, and the size of the document itself is limited to 500K, plus up to 2MB per inserted image. This makes Docs poorly suited to the cosmos of technical or training manuals, as well as formal documents like legal briefs.

Spreadsheets and presentations are similarly size-express. Spreadsheets can exist upwardly to 256 columns, 200,000 cells, or 100 sheets, whichever is reached offset. Presentations started within Google Docs are non limited in size, but imported presentations are limited to 10MB or 200 slides. Beneath those limits, nevertheless, both applications are very strong. The spreadsheet allows you to use most common spreadsheet functions and even populate cells with information pulled from Google searches. A form generator makes information technology possible to collect information from, say, website users, and view the data as a Google spreadsheet.

The presentation editor is well-designed, making putting presentations together about as easy as it is with any other program. A number of themes are included, and y'all can import your own backgrounds besides. Giving presentations is another story, however. The presentation mode, even when you use F11 to make the browser full-screen, notwithstanding includes a Google toolbar at the bottom of the screen, detracting attention from your slides. You likewise won't exist able to control your presentation using a PowerPoint remote.

Where Google Docs excels is in collaboration and sharing, making very effective use of the Internet to get work washed. Documents and spreadsheets can be easily edited by multiple users, with tracking and permissions to make sure nil irreparable happens. Presentations tin can be delivered remotely, paired with Google Talk and controlled from the host's figurer. Annihilation created with Google Docs tin can be shared on the Cyberspace, either as a webpage or equally an embedded document.

The newly released Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook allows Premium subscribers to use Google Apps as a replacement for Microsoft'south expensive Exchange. Installed alongside Outlook, the program allows calendars and contacts, to be shared and searched beyond your company, with features like schedule availability that users expect from Commutation. Notes, tasks, and journals are not shared, but for businesses that don't rely on them too heavily, this might be a fairly constructive replacement for Substitution. A migration utility allows existing Exchange systems to exist easily transferred to your Google Apps account, making the whole process transparent to your employees. (A similar program exists for Lotus Notes users.)

Google Sites, a unproblematic-to-use wiki engine, offers further options for collaboaration. Combined with the task manager in Gmail and the Google Agenda, you can handle most basic projects fairly easily. More complex project direction isn't possible, though – for flowcharting, GANTT charting, and other project management mainstays, y'all'll need a dedicated application.

Google'south Calendar is quite powerful, making it like shooting fish in a barrel to add and share events. A natural language text-entry system parses statements like "Lunch with Bob Smith at Joe'due south Buffet at noon on June 27^thursday," or you can add appointments using a form. Calendars tin be easily shared, and third-political party iCal streams can be subscribed to every bit well. Several non-Google services, similar the task director Think the Milk, utilise Google's API to allow access to their services from the Calendar interface, besides.

On the almost horizon is Google's new Wave platform, a real-time communications and collaboration tool that combines elements of email, instant messaging, wikis, document editing, multimedia sharing, and social networking. Moving ridge is nonetheless in invite-only testing, and as with all things Google we can probably expect information technology to remain in Beta for a long, long time. From what Google has released about Moving ridge so far, it looks similar it will offering great functionality to a express audience of corporate teams and departments, where traditionally wikis might take been the main form of collaboration. For minor face-to-face businesses, it's hard to meet what Wave offers, just larger businesses may find it a pregnant stride up from current collaboration platforms.

Promotion

Google is, most properly, an advertising company, specially with their purchase of online advertising giant Doubleclick. Thus it stands to reason that for promoting your business, Google would be a fine identify to turn.

Blogger, Google's blogging service, offers a decent enough platform for a uncomplicated website. Features are limited, and the lack of customization options might brand branding your site tricky, but it'southward free, even if you mail service the site under your ain domain name (which is uncomplicated to practice and well-documented in the help department). For annihilation more circuitous than a simple blog, though, you're going to want to plow to another service.

Google's AdWords are an effective way to promote your business on the web. Yous cull how much you want to spend and what keywords to display your ads with, and Google handles advertising placement on relevant search pages and sites that host Google ads. Make certain to add your business to Google's local search and Google Maps at the Google Local Business Center too, so you come up when people search for businesses in your area.

Can y'all run your business concern using Google applications and services?

So, tin can you run a business using only Google applications? The answer is, "it depends." For small, local businesses, Google Apps forth with a Blogger site and Google Phonation might be more than enough to handle virtually everything they need. Businesses that do a meaning amount of collaboration will discover Google Docs useful, regardless of size.

For larger companies, likewise as businesses that handle a slap-up deal of sensitive information, privacy and security issues loom large. Having your email, documents, and other material stored on third-party servers is worrisome, no matter what Google's policies promise. And Google is a big target for hackers and other nefarious sorts – though your data might never be targeted, there are plenty of people out there taking a stab at cracking Google just to run into if it tin can be done.

The lack of client relationship management (CRM) is a claiming, every bit is the lack of whatsoever sort of database (ironically, Google Base of operations is not a user-programmable database). Spreadsheets combined with forms just don't quite act as a viable substitute. A small sales team might manage, but a large sales team volition need more than appropriate tools.

Offline admission is also a concern, one which is only partly solved by Google'southward offline plugin, Google Gears. Gears ostensibly offers the power to work offline and synchronize your updates when your computer is back on the Cyberspace, just more often than not offers only a subset of the total capabilities of Google's apps. In Gmail, for case, yous can read and reply to emails, or compose new ones, but you cannot adhere files to emails when in offline mode. Google Docs is worse – access is read-only when offline, meaning you cannot create new documents or edit existing ones. So much for getting work washed on the plane…

Finally, at that place's the question of uptime. Google promises 99.nine% uptime on Google Apps – just that'southward an industry-standard promise that has picayune meaning for end-users. Attempting to log in just to detect yourself in the heart of that .1% reanimation tin exist a large hassle, peculiarly if you lot are waiting for an of import electronic mail or about to send an important certificate.

On the other manus, small and medium businesses experience security and downtime problems simply as severe (if not more) all the time, whether through lack of expertise, user error, or merely plain bad luck. And chances are you lot don't take anything similar the resources, personnel, and security know-how Google has at its disposal to protect yous.

In the cease, whether Google applications and services are right for your business depends on your needs. Carefully weigh your requirements and choose from Google'south menu of applications when they adequately fit the beak. Where they don't, look at their competitors at Zoho, ThinkFree, and even Microsoft (such as Role Alive, soon to offer online versions of Office applications). But yous could practice much worse than because Google starting time.

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/is-google-ready-to-handle-your-business-part-2-of-2.html

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