Google Drive + Goole Apps = Collaboration super powers

We received earlier this week an inquiry about cloud tools to be used within a team on a corporate level: 

The staff is currently using Dropbox to organize spreadsheets and documents on the cloud. It has some distinct drawbacks and I wondered if you had heard of any other service that might be useful. As additional locations are opened it will be useful for all members of mgmt to have access to data as soon as it is prepared. It would also be helpful to have a cloud based scheduling tool so that important meetings were not overlooked. Have you heard of any services that might be helpful? 

Our answer: 

We find that GoogleApps provides a considerable amount of collaboration tools for corporations. You can set-up a domain name with Google: ie. “YourCompany.com,” and have all your staff members as users with e-mail address, document/spreadsheets & forms collaboration, sharing of contacts & contact groups and common calendars shared over the whole domain. This should give you a great start organizing your Google Drive - the newest Google Cloud service - and integrate seamlessly with GoogleApps for Business. 

You can read more about it on GoogleApps for Business website.

With Google providing an open environment for developers, there is additional software available to integrate with GoogleApps services for the rest of the business, be it CRMs, bookkeeping, project management or scheduling. 

A cute Google Apps Market Place video by Google

We also find that providing an internal network and own email server has become increasingly cost-prohibitive, when battling connectivity issues, anti-virus & spam fighting as well as hardware maintenance and the constant need for performance and security issues. 

Access to email over various platforms, (desktop, laptop, mobile, tablets) has its own synchronization problems, which do not arise when working with Google Apps. The Android and iOs apps are state of the art. 

We have used Google Apps for the last four years with various organizations and within our own corporations. Especially for Relevanza, the collaboration on documents for our publishing needs has been an invaluable streamlining tool which reduces clutter in our inbox. Commenting can be done directly on the document without sending the files back and forth. The revision control and the real-time multi-user editing is handled well over the InternWebs. 

Our technology department has assisted a few companies implement GoogleApps for internal work processes and collaboration, via configuration services as well as employee training.