With advancement in mobile email technology in iPhones, Blackberries, and of course, laptops, the world of emails is evolving too. And Google is definitely on top of things, once again. Nearly a year ago my company, Synchronous Design & Marketing, switched to the Google Apps platform for our email and collaboration. We have not looked back since, and the productivity and accessibility is simply amazing.

Most hosting companies do not provide an IMAP platform, and the most common email method is POP3. Even worse, a lot of small businesses opt to simply forward their corporate emails to their hotmail or gmail accounts and reply from those addresses. The downside of using POP3 on your hosting server is that webmail access is often cumbersome and awkward (using CUBE mail or Squirrel Mail etc.) and if you have several computers, you have to delete emails or mark them as read emails on multiple platforms, and that includes your handhelds. With an IMAP platform, however if you read the email on your computer, it will be marked as read on your iPhone as well as your webmail platform.

Putting all this together is the Google Apps solution. This is how you activate Google Apps.

1. Visit https://www.google.com/a/.
2. Sign up for either the free or the Premium edition, as it fits you. You need to have a domain, or sign up for a domain on the spot.
3. Verify domain ownership.
4. Configure your MX record on your domain (this is through your web hosting company).
5. Configure your computer, iPhone, Blackberry, etc.

Using the Google Apps platform, your Mail Exchange record (MX Record) is updated so that all emails are routed go ghs.google.com, or a similar address. The emails are hosted on the Gmail platform, BUT using your domain natively. So even though you are on the gmail platform, you are still natively sending emails from your own company domain.

Using this set-up, you can have IMAP access to your emails from all devices, as well as advanced gmail access if you need webmail access while you’re on the road. As a matter of fact, I find myself often using the gmail platform on my portal at http://portal.synchronous.ca (you won’t be able to log in – you must be an employee) rather than Mail on my Macbook Pro. It’s fast, easy to use, well organized, and clean.

Other benefits of using Google Apps as your email and collaboration solutions are these:

• You get a calendar on the Google Apps platform which can be shared (or not shared) between employees, and synchronized to your desktop calendar (such as Outlook, or iCal)
• You get the Google Docs platform, on which you can do word processing, spreadsheets, and more. No more confusion on who has the most recent file of that proposal document. You work on it together online. And the functions are so robust, you won’t miss Microsoft Word or Pages.
• SalesForce is the most popular CRM solution on the market, and Google and Salesforce are partners. They offer an integrated CRM/Google Apps solution that integrate seamlessly with each other. Visit http://www.salesforce.com/googleapps/ for more details.

Using the Google Apps platform, we have achieved ease of use, time saving, easy collaboration and data sharing, better synchronization, and most of all, relaxation. It just works.