Reaching The 100 Mark

Today we reached an important milestone for our company. The number of review feedback comments from our customers on the Google Solutions Marketplace portal touched 100 today. We wanted to pause and thank all our customers for taking out time and providing valuable review feedback on this portal.

All 5 Stars

We are very pleased that all our customers are happy with our services and given us the highest rating of 5 Stars in their reviews. Along with the honest opinion blurbs, the 5 star ratings are testimonial to our hard work and commitment to our customers. All the hundred customer rating are 5 stars, and we are very proud of our feat. We do have a sneaky suspicion that this ranking system could be gamed, so we have our fingers crossed. And we hope that Google puts in some more checks and balances to keep this fair for all.

We obviously take this feedback loop very seriously and are mindful how important it is in establishing our business. So a big thank you to all our customers, as we re-commit ourselves to providing excellent service in setting up Google Apps. 

Cheers,

The Easy Team

SetupMadeEasy.com Joins Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

We are excited to announce that SetupMadeEasy.com has today become an authorized reseller of the Google Apps™ suite of communication and collaboration tools. The Google Apps Reseller program will help us enhance the value of Google Apps for all our customers. Google Apps Premier Edition offers a broad set of powerful APIs that enable us to add more value to the Google Apps offerings.

Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to organizations. With Google Apps, users can use applications such as Gmail™ webmail service, Google Talk™ instant messaging service, Google Calendar™ calendaring service, Google Docs™ program, Google Sites™ web application, and Google Video™ for business on their own domain to work together more effectively. Best of all, it's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain.

The Google Apps Reseller program includes resellers, consultants and independent software vendors that sell, service and customize Google Apps Premier Edition for their customers. SetupMadeEasy.com received training, support and deployment services from Google, as well as access to APIs for integrating Google Apps into their customers' business operations. SetupMadeEasy.com is able to retain a close relationship with their customers in order to provide additional service and support. The businesses receiving Google Apps will benefit from the additional attention to their specific needs. For more information on about the Google Apps Reseller program, go to www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/resellers or just give us a holler.

Cheers,
The Easy Team
SetupMadeEasy.com

Introductory Pricing Expires

All good things come to an end. The introductory pricing that we have been offering for Google Apps setups expired today. For past several months, we have been offering the standard setup package for $19.99. Many customers got a chance to take advantage of this extremely reasonable pricing. Several small not-for-profit customers took the leap towards Google Apps, just because it was almost a negligible expense for them. One customer commented "The best $20 I have spent!" in her testimonial. To our disbelief, one customer even suggested to raise our prices, because it was "too low." 

Needless to say, we have been very pleased with the feedback that we have been receiving for our high quality service at such a reasonable cost. The Standard Setup Package pricing has been revised to $49.99 from today onwards. We would continue to work hard to keep the service standards high and keep delighting our customers in the future. Thank you!

Video Chat In Gmail

Google announced a cool new feature in Gmail -- voice and video chat right from within your browser. It does require you to install a plugin though. It does work on the Mac, yup. However, the plugin installation requires you to close all your browsers. Don't say we didn't warn you.

The video chat is also available for Google Apps customers who use Gmail. You could click on a contact name in Gmail and it would pop up a small window to begin a chat session. In the 'Options' link in that window, you can find a link to enable video chat. This could be quite useful for businesses where employees are spread out geographically and would sometime like to have a face to face conversation with another fellow employees.

Here is a video from a guy in Gmail team, explaining the virtues of voice and video chat:

The Vidyo Technology

The plugin is about 2MB and incorporates technology from Vidyo which is basically an implementation of a new streaming video standard called the H.264/SVC standard. The company claims to handle good quality video transmission even over lossy "well known" network connections.

And here is a video demonstrating the handling of quality of the video when the network starts getting congested and the packet losses start increasing. There is no sound in the video.

Wishing good luck to Gmail team for a steady growth in usage of voice and video chat!

Google Apps SLA Now Available

Google has today released a detailed Service Level Agreement (SLA) for Google Apps for Premier Edition. Google promises a 99.9% uptime on a monthly basis for each of the web applications -- GMail, Calendar, Docs, Start Page and Google Sites.

You can read the complete SLA at the following location. I must say that language is very "lawyer like" official. Of course, because it is a legal document.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html

Service Outage Credit

One interesting thing about this SLA is that you must ASK for the service credit in case of an outage. And here are the details of the credit you might receive:

Monthly Uptime Percentage	Days of Service added to the end of the Service term, at no charge to Customer
Less than 99.9%, but greater than 99.0%	3
Less than 99.0%, but greater than 95.0%	7
Less than 95.0%	15

And remember, you must ask for the credit within 30 days of the outage to get the credits. And did I mention this SLA is for Premier Edition customers only?

Salesforce And Google Apps

Salesforce is a leading provider of "Software As A Service" (SaaS) solution in the CRM space. It provides web based software for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations. Naturally, many CRM activities involve daily usage of Email, Online Calendar, Chat and documents management software like Word Processor and Spreadsheets. That is where Google Apps comes in as a great integration suite to supplement Salesforce CRM applications.

Deep Integration

The Salesforce applications to manage your Customers, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities etc. can integrate neatly with Google Apps. For example, if you send an email to a customer from your GMail account, it would immediately appear as a dialogue with that customer in Salesforce. The Google Chat window shows up as a small window in the left column of your Salesforce screens. And you can create a Google Doc from inside your Salesforce transaction screens.

Product Tour

Here is a short video from Salesforce to showcase their product integration with Google Apps. This is a quick way to get started with learning how all this works.

And there is much more that just that. Salesforce now integrates not only with Google Apps, it also has good integration with Google AdWords -- to manage search engine marketing campaigns directly from within Salesforce.

How Much Does It Cost?

Salesforce could cost you as less as $65 per user per month for a basic edition. The top of the line "Unlimited Edition" costs a little less than $300 per user per year. The prices seem pretty good considering the cost savings you have by not having to maintain your own hardware, patch updates, IT team and all other overheads that come with "On-premise Software". And if you are a Google Apps customer, you perhaps are already aware how great On-demand software can be.

We at SetupMadeEasy.com can help you setup Salesforce along with Google Apps for your domain. Give us a call -- 650-450-9897.

Cheers,

The Easy Team

SetupMadeEasy.com

Some Setups Are Not Easy!

This post has got nothing to do with Google Apps, but we thought it might be interesting to share this tidbit with you.

Google Apps Setup may seem to baffle the mind of many. Yet, for us here at SetupMadeEasy.com, we have enough expertise now that we do not feel it to be as difficult as say, rocket science. After having fixed the setups of several dozen customers in last couple of months, we now have a feeling of "seen it all, done it all". And hopefully we are right about it too!

Some Setups Are Not Easy!

But here is an example of a setup that dwarfs Google Apps setup. No no, you can not even compare it in magnitudes. This one is beyond rocket science. We are talking about the Biggest. Scientific. Experimental. Setup. Ever. We are talking about the setup of the Large Hadron Collider. Here is a video explaining of its experimental setup:

Even though this is an interesting video, we are not even going to pretend that we follow the explanation completely. Enjoy!