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". "Cloud computing" or "software-as-a-service" 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 needing to maintain the infrastructure that supports them. A simple way to understand the model is how people currently 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 themselves 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; which 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.

And since Google Apps is web-based, your 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.

Businesses look 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 considering the Google Apps solution for your business.

Take a look at the business advantages of Google Apps presents.

• 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

How Google Apps solves these business challenges:

• Dramatically lowers your total cost of ownership with an annual $50 fee for each user account. No hidden maintenance or upgrade expenses - since Google hosts your data,  they 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 our 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 was launched in February of 2007 and since then it is being used by more than 1 million businesses with over 10 million active users on Apps. Over 3,000 businesses are signing up every day!

Google launched Google Apps For Business in February 2007, and ever since there has been an incredible rate of market adoption, including more than 2 million businesses. Over 3,000 businesses are signing up per day on the Google Apps platform. And let's not forget that Google Inc. itself is running its company of 20,000+ employees on Google Apps. We at Searce use it extensively for our operations as well.

 Google Apps For Business users continue to find that it is a great alternative of a hosted solution to 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, we have the leading computing platform and have assembled 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.

To help your business make the switch to Google Apps easier, Google has enabled a smooth IMAP migration from other platforms to Google Apps; this allows administrators to migrate a handful or a few thousand user mailboxes from an existing mail system to corresponding Google Apps mail accounts. Google Apps currently supports migration from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot via the IMAP protocol. IMAP migration is only available in the Google Apps For Business.

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 products are designed to open standards and are compatible with many other products. Gmail also allows you to read your Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and PDF documents directly from your inbox -- no additional software required.

Google operates one of the largest networks of distributed data centers in the world, and impeccable sys to protect the data and intellectual property on these servers. These facilities are protected around the clock and we have a dedicated security operations team which focuses specifically on maintaining the security of our environment. The controls, processes and policies that protect these data have successfully completed a SAS 70 Type II audit. There are three main components to Google's security practices: 

• People – Google employs a full-time information security team including some of the world’s foremost experts in information, application, and network security. This team is responsible for the company’s perimeter defense systems, security review processes, and customized security infrastructure, as well as for developing, documenting, and implementing Google’s security policies and standards.
• Process – Security is part of the Google DNA. Each application is built from the ground up with security in mind. Google applications go through multiple security reviews as part of the Secure Code development process. The application development environment is closely restricted and carefully monitored to maximize security. External security audits are also regularly conducted to provide additional assurance.
• Technology – Google Apps data is fractured and obfuscated across multiple servers and disks, making it human-unreadable. Data is replicated in multiple data centers for redundancy and consistent availability. To reduce exploit risks, each Google server is custom-built with only the necessary software components, and the homogeneous server architecture enables rapid updates and configuration changes across the entire network when necessary.

For more information on Google's privacy policy, please visit its�privacy center.

You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in content which you submit, post or display. As per Google's terms of service, they don't claim ownership or control over your content in Google Docs. For documents you expressly choose to share with others, Google has proper license to display those documents to the selected users and format documents properly for different displays. 

Yes Google Apps has open APIs to all applications and you can get email, calendars, and documents back in other industry formats (IMAP, iCal, MS Office) for migration purposes.

Google Apps can work with Outlook and other application clients, so your employees can continue using a familiar interface on the front-end, while Google Apps' servers works on the back-end, helping you save on significant costs for your business.

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

Visit the Google Apps mobile access page to learn more.

Google Apps For Business is $50 USD per user account per year. One user account is considered to be one email inbox. It is not $50 per domain. For example, two email inboxes (user1@company.com, user2@company.com) would cost 2 x $50 = $100 per year. User aliases and domain aliases are not charged as additional user accounts.

It is very easy to have multiple domain names use a single Google Apps account where you own all of the domains.

You can centrally control all domains from one Google Apps account using "domain aliases" as additional domain names. These aliases are associated with your primary domain and function with your current set of user accounts. For instance, if you own the domains abc.com, def.com and ghi.com, you can create a primary Google Apps account for abc.com and add def.com and ghi.com as domain aliases. Emails addressed to user@def.com or user@ghi.com will be routed to the mailbox for user@abc.com.

There is no charge for domain aliases and alias user accounts; you only pay for user accounts on your primary domain.

This will cause all users to have email accounts for every domain alias and all mail will come from the primary domain. If some email accounts need to only get mail from one of the domain aliases, we recommend you signing each of the domains up as its own primary domain under separate Google Apps accounts.