Google Apps is a collection of various tools like email, shared documents and calendars, and instant messaging in one unified system.  It allows the business organization to use its own domain name for the email addresses giving it more prestige and credibility when communicating with someone from outside the company.  And using the same email accounts, the employees may send instant messages or chat to each other and the resulting conversation is automatically added to the user’s inbox for future reference.

Shared documents is a fairly new concept and the idea behind this is that a document can be edited in real time by more than one person.  All persons authorized to edit the shared document will always see the latest version of each document.  This allows users to edit a document without needing to attach the document in an email for review.  And perhaps the best thing about shared documents is that everyone sees the latest version everytime.

Users can share and collaborate on making a draft of text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.  It is not recommended though to put elaborate formatting on Google Apps because it would require higher bandwidth overall, especially that in Bohol, not all users have access to high bandwidth broadband service.  When using Google Apps, users should focus on the content and when the draft is already final, they can download the document to a regular office application like OpenOffice or MS Office where they can implement the required formatting.

In addition to the convenience of real-time collaboration, the documents are always in your Google Apps account and you don’t have to carry a USB drive everytime.  You just need to access the Internet to download the documents for printing.  Also, just recently, Google Apps allowed users to upload any document so you can also upload the final and formatted document for safe keeping.

For organizations needing an efficient environment for collaboration within the office to anywhere in the world, Google Apps is perhaps the best system available that is free and have the capacity of 7GB per user.  If you need a bigger storage, you may upgrade your whole domain to the premium service to have 25GB capacity plus other premium features.  Combined with the use of your own domain, you can create your own official domain, email address, chat system and document archive.