Google apps

[shifty2]

Anyone using this? What are the advantages compared to your typical hosting sites. Are there any good guides around to starting with it?

[Orlsend]

I think they are Gadgets, nto hsting services.... :X

[loell]

or do you mean google app engine rather?

[shifty2]

I was talking about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Apps - as far as I understood I thought it was basically a hosting service that provided a lot of stuff out of the box. I may have got the wrong end of the stick though.

[mbeach]

shifty2: i've been using this for a number of sites (small retail stores). For me it allowed very easy setup of personal email addresses - buy the domain name you want, then point the mx record to google, setup the users and they get gmail (more or less) branded to some degree with your company logo etc. Also allows you to easily share calendars within your domain, as well as using 'sites' and documents for things that would be normally emailed around a bunch of times - very good for help/how to documents and training references.

It saved me the hassle of having to setup a mail server, deal with spam, uptime, server maintenance etc, plus provided most of my staff with an interface for mail that they were already familiar with (gmail). Plus each user gets a good amount of space - the downside is very occasionally its been reported to be unavailable - but resolved quite quickly.

Also, with some of the newer 'features' I can have the employees fill out basic forms with some things I'd normally have to program a web page to do or get them to email me, then I'd fill in the data in some spreadsheet or db. Its not fantastic for things that are overly complex (talking about the form submission) but its good for some simple things. Also, once the app engine becomes more available (I haven't checked back into this) I believe I can write an app with data storage, which would be available through the google hosted login (the employees like it for the ease of remembering only one username/password).

I haven't really used it much for external use (people outside of the company hitting the website for example) but I believe the capability is there although I think (not sure on this) you are somewhat forced into a particular set of templates, which you have limited ability to change (I could be wrong on this one). For our external website, I host elsewhere but not because the ghs couldn't do it.

[Wybiral]

I use both google app engine AND google apps. Google app engine for a great scalable host (which runs Python), and google apps for my email service and for using my domain with google app engine.

I'm using both of them for challenge-you.com (http://www.challenge-you.com)