The Situation
A small company was looking for a working office solution without paying ridiculous fees for simple services. In other words, they were up for an innovative solution. The company has 5 employees, is growing and owns 3 domain names. They're looking for a hosting and website solution, but in this particular case they needed office applications and email.
The solution
Google offers a service called apps for your domain, a service that enables Google's Mail, calendering and more on your domain name. This means you allow google to host your email, and they throw in their extra's like calendar, Google Talk and more. Details :
- You can have up to 50 users in your domain
- All users have mail, a startpage, a calendar (shared within the domain) and Google Talk
- Contacts are automatically sync'ed between domain users so you can easily find eachother
- If you have multiple domain names, the first is leading and the others are treated as aliases
In other words, this is a very impressive service that is still completely free. If you work in a real or virtual office, Google Apps for your domain is very interesting, especially for small companies or independent contractors or freelancers such as myself.