Google Apps: Experience

    There are more than 500 topics on Google Apps on the hub, mostly news items, but there are practically no real reviews on the use of these applications. I want to fill in this gap a little, well, and a little PR :) We have been using the Google Apps application for over a year now, so we can see the pros and cons of their pros and cons.

    Materiel

    The application includes six services: mail, calendar, document service, messenger, web page service and video service (intracorporate YouTube).

    Why Google Apps

    I’ll tell you more about the pros of the solution:
    • The availability of any of the services at any time of the day from any computer or mobile phone with an Internet connection.
    • The well-known Gmail , with the ability to configure forwarding, work in safe mode, connecting many useful widgets. Convenient special client for mobile phones.
    • A multifunctional Google calendar , setting reminders for e-mail and sms, the ability to "overlay" a calendar on a colleagues calendar, plan events / holidays / vacations for six months / a year in advance.
    • The ability to work together with documents of all popular formats, the availability of all the latest versions of documents is always at hand.
    • Messenger Google Talk - the ability to conduct group chat, save history.

    Why did we choose this particular solution?

    In short, because it’s convenient. Our team is strongly distributed geographically across different cities. Colleagues constantly reel on business trips, and it’s really convenient for us to work without being tied to the workplace, organize joint work and communication with colleagues, plan work - it’s especially convenient to do this not in a dozen different programs, but in one web that can be flexibly customized to individual requirements service. Google Apps is a practical implementation of the virtual desktop concept.
    Opinions

    Here are a few words from my employees about the advantages of the solution:
    “One of the main reasons why Google Apps is convenient for us is the ability to integrate with our Exchange server. On Linux, there are actually only 2 ways to work with mail on such a platform:
    • Outlook Web Access (whose interface is significantly inferior to the usability interface of apps);
    • MS Outlook through Citrix. This method is not always suitable for speed.
    From apps, you can send mail on behalf of another account and receive mail via pop3 from our Exchange, ”- Yuri Vidineev, system administrator.

    “Mail: it always works. Even if other Google services “fall off”, mail does not stop working. Own corporate mail remains far behind in this regard. Google Docs: Allows you to read .doc, .xls, txt, and other popular formats. It is especially useful that you can read the document attached to the letter without downloading it to the machine. Google Calendar: duplicates reminders with a letter to your mail and SMS. It’s especially convenient to set two notification methods at once, so that later, when parsing mail, you can once again monitor the desired event, ”Yegor Kovyazin (lead developer). For me, the main feature is still accessibility from anywhere from fairly frequent business trips.

    A spoon of tar?

    With all the advantages, a solution from Google has much to strive for. The main disadvantage in my opinion is the lower number of functionality compared to desktop systems. Of course, 80% of users use only 20% of the functionality, but what do users like me do? The second thing I wanted to note is that it is not so good integration with other applications.

    Eating your own dog food?

    A very good principle: "Use what you sell." In addition to direct use in daily activities and sales , we also implemented several projects using the Google Calendar API: the product was designed not only for end users, but also for customization.
    To summarize all of the above, I’ll just say: after a year of active use, we made a unanimous decision to renew the subscription to the service.

    If there are specific questions about use, I and my colleagues will be happy to answer in the comments.

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