Tech Thursday: Google Apps

Google Apps has been around for a little while now but is just now making some traction within the business world. Here is a nice article about the new Team Edition of their apps. It has a nice video to go with it. Hat Tip to Mashable for the article.

Why is this important? Our church staff just switched to Google Apps. As a non-profit it was free. It is hard to pass up Google and Free. Especially when we were paying $400 a month on outsourcing e-mail. Now e-mail is free for us and we get the added bonuses of Google Docs, Calendars, Talk, and Start Page. This means that all of our pastors and support staff are Googlefied. (OK, maybe not a word but still say it out loud and it is fun) No more worries about getting e-mail at home or not being able to access their calendar or the churches' main calendar. All of our staff can do that from anywhere. It is much easier to access this information from our cell phones as well. Now that Google supports IMAP as well, it is easy to set up GMail in Outlook if someone just has to have it instead of the web version.

This transition hasn't been flawless but even our non-technology people are doing well just after a couple of days. Thank you Google once again for leading in a way that helps out non-profits and gives us cutting edge tools to do our work.