At Simplifive we have been using Google Hosted for quite sometime which is essentially a private, branded version of GMail, GCalendar, and GTalk. I absolutely love it, not to mention it being free.

By my calculations we have saved several thousands of dollars by not having Microsoft Exchange and the time it would take for me to administer it. For these reasons we have begun offering consulting on web services like these to small companies who can embrace offerings like Google’s and others that provide hosted productivity solutions. I recently wrote several articles about Software as a Service like the ‘Saas Case Study‘ and ‘Office 2.0 in a Web 2.0 World‘.

Now, Google has a new but similar offering to that of Hosted, simply ‘Google Apps for Your Domain‘. It includes use of Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator. You can sign up here. I wonder why Spreadsheets and Writely are not integrated (although I am sure they will soon).

I also stumbled upon Google Apps for Education which seems to be simply a versioning ploy of bundling their software for an additional niche (hey, Google learned something from Microsoft).

Fom the edu site:

Sharing information and ideas is vital to learning. So imagine how valuable it would be if your entire campus community shared a set of powerful, easy-to-use and integrated communication and collaboration services. With Google Apps for Education, you can offer all of your students innovative email, instant messaging, and calendaring, all for free.* You can select any combination of our available services (see below), and customize them with your school’s logo, color scheme and content. You can manage your users through an easy web-based console or use our available APIs to integrate the services into your existing systems — and it’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

Google Apps for Education

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