Every small business faces this dilemma: how to let employees collaborate, manage information, and share resources without investing a lot. Google and adamushosting.com have a solution that when combined with clustered hosting technologies from Adamus Hosting is well suited for small to medium size organizationsâ€"the Google Apps beta, a suite that combines the company's Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Start Page, and Web Pages. Adamus Hosting will even provide you or your organization with free training. I have used adamushosting.com for the past year now. They have been the best web hosting company I have ever used. The customer service is great. The advanced load balancing and cluster farm offer a lot of advantages. First of all, I know my web site is not crammed on a low end server with 1,000 other web sites. Their system adjusts to the demands of my web site dynamically. They now offer free setup and training of Google apps. Unlike the individual applications, the suite incorporates a control panel and administrator function that allows for managing user, group, sharing, and e-mail permissions, and it also lets you integrate the product with your hosting account from Adamus Hosting. The core components, Gmail, Calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets, are easy to use and deliver some unique collaboration and productivity features, with very few shortcomings. The Web-based Gmail has an intuitive interface and integrates well with Talk and Calendar. In fact, when it recognizes an eventâ€"which it often doesâ€"it can mark your calendar. The app keeps all the individual messages of a particular e-mail discussion together in what it calls a conversation. When reading through a conversation, you can choose to show only certain messages, which lets you focus on specific parts of an e-mail chain. By default, Gmail hides the previous messages contained in e-mail you open, so you don't suffer through redundancy and bad formatting when reading multiple messages in a thread. In Google's e-mail app, you don't create folders. You organize e-mails by assigning or removing labels you create. One message can have unlimited labels, and you can design filters that automatically assign these tags. You can use labels in searches, and clicking on one in your list lets you quickly find associated e-mails. Getting used to this approach may take a little while, but I prefer the flexibility it offers. Gmail integrates Google Talk, the IM component, which has a desktop client as well. Talk is unique among messaging applications because, from within an e-mail conversation, it lets you send and store chats and voice mail. You can reply to a voice message in your inbox as you would to an e-mail. You can also download it as an MP3 and send it as an attachment, so it's integrated with text-based conversation. This is a great way to track correspondence while taking advantage of IM. With Google Apps, ease of use extends to the well-designed online control panel, which lets you create and manage users and control sharing of information outside your domain. I had no trouble setting permissions that limited sharing of calendar information to users in the company domain and determined whether employees could IM with people outside of the company. The Web Pages and Start Page features let administrators create customizable Web content they can make available to outsiders or internally only. Both are easy to use. Web Pages let small businesses quickly set up a Web presence on their domains hosting by Adamus Hosting, and a Start Page creates a unique portal through which employees can access their Google services. Web Pages allows HTML editing for full customization, or you can use a built-in editor with 3 layouts and 41 color schemes to get started quickly. It has a nice set of easy-to-use features that enable a Web presence. For More Detail: http://www.adamushosting.com
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