Anyone Using Google Apps?

[StanUpshaw]

Specifically in a small business setting? My aim is to get our newspaper office out of its current disarray, and at some point establish some sort of web presence.

Any anecdotes would be helpful.

[Bob Impact]

I do, though for a very large corporation, what specifically are you looking to do?

If you're looking to run feeds in/out check out programmableweb.com
Also google's got a pretty sweet command line api out now for a lot of the services: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ and if you need answers on anything you can basically bet that someone posted it to stackoverflow.com at some point.

[Bob Impact]

Also, make sure you read the Terms for everything, google doesn't do blanket terms and there are a few APIs (maps specifically) that are not free for commercial use. Yahoo maps is as I recall.

[StanUpshaw]

Its immediate use would be for email, managing text documents so 20 different versions aren't floating around, maintaining a simple spreadsheet for our advertising, and hopefully just facilitating better communication.

We're completely hampered by our ISP's email service, and for the cost of upgrading through them, we can pay for at least 1 user (how do "users" work, by the way).

And blind accessibility is probably a make-or-break thing. Do you know if text is presented in some sort of standard web format, or is it buried in some java app or something?

[Bob Impact]

Its immediate use would be for email, managing text documents so 20 different versions aren't floating around, maintaining a simple spreadsheet for our advertising, and hopefully just facilitating better communication.

We're completely hampered by our ISP's email service, and for the cost of upgrading through them, we can pay for at least 1 user (how do "users" work, by the way).

And blind accessibility is probably a make-or-break thing. Do you know if text is presented in some sort of standard web format, or is it buried in some java app or something?

Google docs or box.net will handle the first, I don't deal with either too often but as far as I know you can save into basically any format in google although I think they recently set some caps on the filesizes. For quick collaborative stuff theres always Titan Pad sample: http://titanpad.com/mQOkQ7XPvp I think you can get a private pad as well but there's a small charge.