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How much should you pay for the most powerful corporate email solution on the planet, which needs to be completely unbiquitous and fully featured? Well ... nothing actually!
As we are intensely involved with analysis and use of Google services in order to assess their mpact on the future of computing, we have come across an amazing aspect of Google which (so far) escaped our proper notice. It is so interesting that we have decided to dedicate a completely separate article to it. This article's initial version is being written in Google Notebook.
So far free email services have been widely available and most web users tend to think of them as near enough perfect. At worst free email is 'good enough' for day-to-day needs. One aspect where free email has not been good enough is the fact that it 'belongs to a company' (i.e. MSN, Yahoo, etc.).
An email is supposed to be a ubiquitous communication medium which is easily accessible from any place on the planet. That is certainly true with the likes of Hotmail, however, it does mean that you have to log into your Hotmail account at hotmail.com and then send email from there from (mostly) a PC or a laptop and have access to the emails which have been sent and received through your Hotmail account.
In comes Google with the concept of Gmail. It not only offers much more storage space (i.e. 2GB per account and growing), but also brings some new concepts into the way in which it email application works.
Organising and searching through Gmail emails is a really simple and quick matter. Email conversations are bunched up in an easy to overview list of related messages and the labels feature makes things even more easier to group in a flexible way.
You may think 'So what?!' to all of the above mentioned facts. You are largely right in doing so. Gmail in itself is nothing too special considering what Google is capable of overall. However here comes the twist in the tale.
We recently applied to open 1000 Gmail @flexewebs.com accounts. You may ask yourself 'How is this possible?'. Well it is and that is where the real beauty of Gmail comes into play.
We have now ported our email 'matters' to Gmail hosted email accounts which are all working through Flexewebs.com domain. We can open up more @flexewebs.com emails accounts for anyone who needs them including our staff of course.
So how does it work when it comes to Thunderbird, our recommended email client you may ask. Google has taken care of even that matter. It is possible to install an extension to Thunderbird which will enable using Gmail hosted email accounts (in our case @flexewebs.com emails) through Thunderbird. The major difference with everything is that each mail received and sent through
Thunderbird then gets stored on Google's main supercomputer giving us a central storage point. This means that Gmail's hosted solution can be made completely ubiquitous, meaning that you will be able to open Gmail emails on any device, send and receive them and have them always sit on the central spot, where you can always go back to them and search through them. This is such a practically useful feature, that we now deem as a leading solution for corporate email (especially for small businesses).
An interesting aspect of the hosted Gmail is the fact that the administrator can customise the email interface for all the other users, giving it a company custom branded look. We now have all our @flexewebs.com emails accessible through Gmail's hosted solution and whenever we 'land' on the interface Flexewebs logo is presented in the top left corner. Very nice!
Looking a step or two further, it is possible to see where all of this is going. Once you log into your hosted Gmail account you have access to other Google services, such as spreadsheets, calendar and photo albums. This brings users into a position from which they can easily manage other aspects of their business, such as time and perhaps some simple or complex information management.
Overall, Google is doing an excellent job of making it possible to 'virtually manage' a business and their services are definitely going to help a modern small business do things better, faster, simpler, more collaboratively and more efficiently without need for using paper at any point in the workflow process.
