Google Applications: A Boon for SMEs

Google has been a centre for innovation for years now. G-mail is undoubtedly the most user friendly e-mailing tool. But Google has gone a step ahead and has developed a basket of Google application accessible by your domain name. Their offering resembles Microsoft Office and includes email, a calendar, chat, document/spreadsheet/presentation software, a web page editor and a structured wiki site for collaboration. Also the company can customize the domain name to make it ….@organization name.com for any individual in the organisation. It can be a boon for small and medium-sized businesses as it would become effortless to manage large data and the icing on the cake is that it is absolutely free. Lets analyse the saving in cost, an SME can enjoy; MS - Office costs Rs. 25,000 per user and the same offering on Google applications is free. So in an MSME which has 10 desktops the saving would work out as Rs.2,50,000.

Its not only the saving in cost but the ease with which you can plan, coordinate, execute and share your work.
 
Let’s take an instance of a sales deal. For successfully closing a sales deal it is very essential to keep everyone associated with the deal on track. The challenge is when the people and the sales tools like documents, communication shared are at different places. But Google can help integrating the whole process. Critical e-mails shared can be accessed anywhere from home, office and now even on your mobiles with help of Gmail. If you need to plan a meeting with your team and the team members are located at different places, just check their availability on the Google Shared Calendar. Just send an invite on the mutually convenient date and time and share the time, venue. The sales team is traveling and a new sales proposal needs to be created, how will you do it? Just go to Google documents create a spreadsheet or power point presentation or a word doc and share it with your team. Your team can edit it real time thus making attachments a history. But what if you are offline, with a special feature - enable offline download you can access the documents offline too and then share it again once you are online. This saves a lot of clutter created due to multiple versions.

Google applications help SMEs to integrate the whole business on a single click!!

Contributed by Anku Sharma, Knowledge Buddy