Top FAQs

Google listened to many companies share what's important to them in building and growing a healthy business. What they found is that businesses are looking for a low-cost, reliable, and secure messaging and collaboration solution that supports their business rather than challenges it. If your business finds itself identifying with some of these challenges, then you might be interested in the Google Apps solution.

Take a look at the Google Apps for Business advantages that our customers have found out for themselves.

Business challenges:

• Cost and resource-draining IT challenges, such as unreliable servers, setup and maintenance expenses, and operating a multi-OS environment
• Small email inboxes
• Virus attacks, Spam and phishing
• Compliance to internal and external policies
• Consumption of disk space
• Inefficient sharing and collaboration

Google Apps Solutions:

• Dramatically lowers your total cost of ownership for each user account. No hidden maintenance or upgrade expenses - since Google hosts your data, we absorb those costs so that you don't have to.
• Boost employee productivity with 25GB of storage per user - your employees can focus on their work rather than on their email quota.
• Lean on the 99.9% service level agreement for email to make sure your business is up-and-running.
• Share information, don't send it. Real-time document editing cuts down the hassle of sending email attachments and version confusion.
• You're actually safer with Google Apps. Since your data is hosted on Google's reliable and redundant data centers, you can stop saving your corporate data on insecure devices, a leading cause of data security problems.
• Better message control over what comes in and what goes out of your company with Google Apps' message security and administrative management controls.
• Access anywhere, anytime you have an internet connection - whether on your mobile device, laptop, or computer in a multi-OS environment (PC, Mac, Linux).

Google Apps for Business is for businesses of all sizes that want to move their messaging or collaboration tools to a hosted solution.

Google Apps for Business offers premium services specifically designed for the business space. Google Apps for Business customers are able to take advantage of:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee as a service level agreement
• Massive storage space
• Enhanced technical support via expedited email and 24/7 phone assistance for critical issues
• Advanced spam and virus filtering beyond standard Gmail filtering
• Outgoing message policy enforcement
• Message archiving and compliance - Migration, mail routing, and gateway tools to help you make a seamless transition to Google Apps
• Integration APIs so you can integrate Google Apps with your existing IT environment
• Professional service partners for deployments, custom solutions

Google Apps is a web-based hosted solution, which means you can access Google Apps at anytime, anywhere you have an Internet connection. You might hear this type of technology referred to as "software-as-a-service" or "cloud computing.” This is a computing model in which IT applications are provided “as a service”, allowing users to access these applications from the Internet ("in the cloud") without maintaining the infrastructure that supports them. It is comparable to the way people allow companies to run and manage their electricity, rather than generating it within their home/office themselves.

With Google Apps, your data and the applications are served from Google's highly secure, scalable, and reliable data centers. Google actually builds its own data centers from scratch, so we're able to have one of the lowest cost-per-server infrastructures in the world. This means that those savings are passed on to our Google Apps customers. Your business is able to offload the infrastructure costs and the effort it takes to maintain an on-premises solution, and focus those savings on more strategic IT initiatives.

Since Google Apps is web-based, employees can be productive from anywhere, whether they're at their own desk, using a different computer, or on the go with a mobile device.

Google launched Google Apps for Business in February 2007, and has seen an incredible rate of market adoption. More than 4 million businesses currently use Google Apps and over 5,000 businesses sign up for the platform per day. And let's not forget that Google Inc. itself is running its company of 20,000+ employees on Google Apps.

Customers continue to find that Google Apps for Business is a great alternative other alternate on-premise solutions, such as Microsoft® Exchange. Here are some of their reasons why:

Lower cost: Google delivers Google Apps to your business over the Web at a fraction of the cost of installed systems. This means that Google Apps can provide a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Mailbox redundancy, infrastructure upgrades and infrastructure scaling are all handled behind the scenes by Google, so your business doesn't need to budget time and money for these projects.

Higher quality: Google Apps offers superior security, reliability, and storage space than most organizations can accomplish with an on-premises solution.

Improved usability: Google Apps provides the simple, intuitive interface so that there's minimal training resources involved for end-users.

Leader in Innovation: Google continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in terms of web-based innovation. Driving this platform forward, Google has the leading computing platform and one of the strongest teams of computer scientists in the industry. As a Google Apps for Business customer you get to experience that innovation first-hand as product enhancements are rolled out on a regular basis.

Google Apps for Businesses is a packaged product of Google's best messaging and collaboration applications, among which include Gmail™, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video.

You may have experience using many of these applications with your user@gmail.com account, and while these applications are similar, Google has enhanced them in Google Apps for Business with these critical differences:

1. Google Apps is for your business
   When you sign up for Google Apps for your business, you sign up with your own company domain name. So rather than having a user@gmail.com email address, you would create or maintain a company email address such as user@your_remax_franchise.com. There is an IT administrative control panel that is built into Google Apps for your business where an IT administrator can manage and control the user accounts across your company domain.
2. Enhanced business-oriented features
   Though Google’s product engineers are continually enhancing applications for free consumers, they are also adding separate, enhanced features to the Google Apps applications that are more oriented for business purposes. Here are just a few things you can do in Google Apps for your business that are not available in the free consumer applications:

• Increased Access Controls: Puts your company in control of how your information is shared and communicated outside of your domain.
• Gmail: Saves all your corporate information with improved mailing list capabilities, and increased mail thresholds
• Google Sites: Understanding that a company intranet and shared documentation is so critical to success, optimized to provide you with the right storage quotas to address your business needs
• Google Calendar: Enables conference room and resource sharing, allowing you to schedule office conference rooms or other shared resources in your office.
• Google Video: Share internal videos with your company quickly without the complex overhead of many other systems

Google understands that employees want to be able to work when and where they want and to do so, they are taking the data with them. Businesses are finding themselves in the position where more and more employees are burning corporate data onto CD/DVD, thumb drives, and putting data on their home machines to work on in the evenings and weekends. This has created serious security concerns, because not only do these incidents expose the data to unwanted eyes but often times we lose the data permanently since much of data resides on laptops or desktops.

As such, Google takes the privacy and security of customer data very seriously. Security is core to the DNA at Google. Google’s products are designed with security considerations upfront, not as afterthoughts, and their Security team is comprised of some of the world’s leading experts in information, application and network security. Their infrastructure is composed of tens of thousands of identical systems, with custom built hardware. Google machines are built on a custom Linux software stack that is hardened and only has the necessary components and services to run the Google requirements, making it easy to uniformly update all systems. Each single piece of data is replicated in multiple datacenters, so your Google Apps email is replicated to a primary and a backup data center, that are replicated in real time. Google also undergoes regular security reviews by third parties and SSAE 16 audits by an independent third party.

Also keep in mind the following:

• Google does not claim ownership of your data.
• Google doesn’t share your data except as strictly outlined in our Privacy Policy.
• Google keeps the data as long as you want.
• Google deletes the data when you ask.
• Google allows you to take the data out of their system if you decide to switch to a different solution, or if you want to use your data in another application or integrate with other systems.

Yes, Docs is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats and many other standards such as PDF, OpenOffice, and ODF. Standard Microsoft file formats are supported for import/export from and to all these popular formats. Google Apps products are designed to open standards and are compatible with many other products.
 
Gmail allows you to read your Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF documents directly from your inbox -- no additional software required.

Yes, LTech handles full migration of email, calendar and contacts from numerous email platforms to Google Apps. View our Migration page for further details.

In addition to messaging and collaboration solutions like Gmail and Docs, Google Apps also gives you access to a large variety of additional enterprise applications through the Google Apps Marketplace. These applications can help you with your most common business functions such as sales, marketing and finance. Many applications can directly operate with Gmail, Calendar, Docs and contacts, helping you to work faster and more efficiently.

Absolutely. If you already have a company domain name, or need to create a new one, Google Apps can meet your needs. Each user at your domain will get a Google Apps account branded with your own domain name. Email addresses take the format 'username@your_remax_franchise.com.'

Google Apps is accessible from a variety of mobile phones, including BlackBerry devices, the iPhone, Windows Mobile and many less powerful mobile phones. We offer multiple syncing capabilities so that you can access your Google Apps account when you're on the go.

If you need additional assistance, support, or professional services for your Google Apps deployment, visit the Google Apps Marketplace. LTech can provide full deployment services, user training, custom application development, data migration and additional apps that integrate with Google Apps.