Google Hosted Review

After screaming for an account last year, Google was kind enough to give me a Google Hosted account to handle our eMail at Ormigo. We already have an account at Fusemail for all those that want/need IMAP but for the large part, all the customer care people for example, GMail is more than enough for their needs.

I thought I’d write a small review for those thinking about getting an account. All in all I am very happy with the current setup.

So what can you do with it? First of all you get your own personal start page, where you can require a set amount of content for users and allow them to add other things. As you get a mail and a calendar system, you can for example allow them to add their calendar to the system, as well as an rss feed from your corporate blog for example. This could be required, allowing people to add other things themselves.

The system to set up new users is very easy, allowing you to upload csv files with lots of users or setting them up one by one. You can also set up additional email addresses and lists. For your email needs this is really most you will need. As a nice thing, the logins will not interfere with your main google login, so you can have your personal gmail account open as well as your corporate gmail account. Once an account is set up you can print a simple one page sheet that gives people the url, their login and a generated password to log in for the first time. And once they are logged in you will have an internal system for send instant messages too.

The calendar is obviously great, and I am starting to use this as my only calendar, simply synchronized to my iCal.

We also have very little spam problems with the system and users are generally very happy to use it. With 50 free accounts it will scale very well for us so if you are looking for a good, secure, fast, and easy to use email service, I’d definitely request an account. Sure, you won’t have IMAP, but that is survivable for most people. Once they come out with the mobile GMail app for hosted domains, I will be all settled in.