I recently began using google apps for my day job, the aptly titled KevinSpenceLLC. I was looking for a cheap solution for email, calendaring and web publishing. So far, I am pleased with the standard edition.

The standard is free to use and comes with a collection of existing google products(Gmail, pagecreator, calendar, etc.) I used a domain that I had previously registered with godaddy. I had to create some cname aliases with godaddy to customize the urls I wanted to use.

Dash Board

All of the applications are managed from the dashboard. It was all pretty straight forward and it didn’t take too much time for me to familiarize myself with everything.

Page Creator

I used the templates provided to create the webpages for my law firm’s site. They were straight forward to use and allowed a little customizing of the html within the boxes. For most people this should be enough and it took me a few hours to put it all together. I’m sure there is an unending array of gadgets that I could have added to the site but I chose not to. All in all, page creator was easy to use and turned out a reasonable looking site in a short amount of time.

Calendar

I like the idea of being able to check my calendar anywhere there is internet access. Also easily coordinates with other users. I’ve only used it for 2 days so I have no real opinion on it.

Email

Email is simply gmail branded with your domain name. I’ve used gmail for my personal account and was using Horde for my firm’s webmail. Gmail is much nicer.

So far I like for what I’m using it for(email, webpage and calendar) and it is free. One thing that I wouldn’t mind having is a free accounting application.