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!

YouTube Videos for Google Apps

If you would like to learn Google Apps with the help of video tutorials, there exists a channel on YouTube for just that purpose here:

http://www.youtube.com/GoogleApps

This channel is published by the Google Apps team itself. There are video tutorials for all of Google's suite of communication and collaboration products including GMail, Calendar, Sites and Chat.

Partner Case Studies

Not only does this channel help you learn using Google Apps, it also has case study videos from some of the major partners like SADA Systems, Appirio and Astadia. 

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CAC2420E3E3EF1DC

Customer Testimonials

One of the best ways to understand the usefulness of Google Apps is the testimonials and review feedbacks from real customers. There exists a playlist with over a dozen videos displaying the positive feedback of some very excited customers.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5D03DA3C38B5AA78

Some of the larger customers include Salesforce.com and Trilogy. And you also have testimonials from the likes of Prudential Preferred Properties and SF Bay Pediatrics. Similarly, there are videos from Universities and Non-profit Organizations.

Google Apps Setup

And yes, they do have a bunch of videos to help setup Google Apps. You can learn all about CNAME entries and MX Records and such like.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=445899A1305C271C

So overall, a great resource to get started on Google Apps. And learn some google apps setups, if you like it.

Cheers,

The Easy Team

SetupMadeEasy.com

Domain Provider Idiosyncrasies

The reason Google has itself not been able to provide a neat way to migrate your domain to Google Apps is that the setups for the DNS settings is not standardized across various Domain Providers. Each one has its own user interface and navigation steps. And no one seems to provide an API to manage the DNS entries.

The Idiosyncrasies

And as if the UI and navigation complexities were not enough, some of the Domain Providers have very specific idiosyncrasies to complicate the matters further. A case in point is Verio Hosting. 

1. The Extra "L": While entering the CNAME Records in their Control Panel, you can not enter the server specified by Google i.e. ghs.google.com. Instead, you have to enter ghs.l.google.com. For example, if you want to set up CNAME Record for mail.yourdomain.com, you have to point to ghs.l.google.com. Verio disallows CNAMEs that point to another CNAME and apparently ghs.google.com is a CNAME that points to ghs.l.google.com. Hat tip to Davidjz for this tip.
2. The Trailing Dot: And when you enter the CNAME 'Points To' server, you mst end it with a DOT character. So it must be ghs.l.google.com{dot}. If you forget this dot, Verio appends ".yourdomain.com" to the server name. You don't want that.
3. MX Records Have Dot As Well: The trailing dot is required not only with the CNAME entries, each of your MX Records must end with a dot as well. So the correct entry for the first MX Record is aspmx.l.google.com{dot}. Again, if you forget this trailing dot, Verio appends ".yourdomain.com" to the server name. And no, you don't want that either.

As long as these non-standard setup requirements remain for various domain providers, Google would continue to have to depend on service providers like Setup Made Easy to help customers migrate to Google Apps. 

By the way, SetupMadeEasy.com has climbed up to rank #3 in the small business section of Google Solutions Marketplace today. We are very proud of this achievement in such a short span of time. We plan to continue to deliver our high class service at reasonable prices in the future and become the number one Google Apps solution provider soon. Amen!

Cheers,

The Easy Team

SetupMadeEasy.com

Google Apps: Now With Video

Google launched a new service this week for Google Apps customers -- the Video service. Think of it as YouTube for your own company. It may be used for training or leadership videos or even videos to evangelize new initiatives within your company.

The collaboration, security and privacy features are obviously built in, as we have come to expect from all the Google Apps products. You can chose to share the videos only with an individual or a group or the whole organization. You can tag them and search them and even download them to your iPods/iPhones.

Google Videos is, however, available only to the Google Apps Premier Edition at this time. So if you really love doing videos in your company, be prepared to shell out $50 per user per year to upgrade to the Premier Edition.

All You Can Eat Google Apps @ $19.99 Only

Setting up Google Apps for your domain is such a wonderful productivity leap for small businesses. You get GMail, Docs, Calendar, Sites, Start Page, Chat, the built-in collaboration tools, all the security features, and much more -- all for free from Google. So why should setting it up cost you thousands or even hundreds of dollars?

Enterprise Level Pricing? Not For Small Businesses Please

When we started this business just a couple of months ago, we found that small businesses had to pay premium "Enterprise" level service fees for Google Apps setup. We at SetupMadeEasy.com wanted to provide a reasonably priced service to our customers so they could enjoy all the great utility applications from Google. So we priced our introductory charges at just $19.99 for a standard setup package. Since then, this has helped many of our customers to take a leap and get professional help with their setup process. 

That One Silly Typo...

Our customers have given us very positive feedback on how our reasonably priced but high quality services have helped them avoid the frustrations that could come from missing one tiny bit of instruction or one silly typo that could ruin the whole setup.

Although Google has done a great job documenting how to do the Apps setup by yourself step by step, most of the small business owners have no idea what a CNAME or MX Record means. They just want it all to work. And Google, despite all its great powers over the internet, has not been able to make it work 'out-of-the-box'. The simple reason is that each Domain Host and each Web Host has it own quirky way of doing these setups.

Help Is Right Here

And that is where we come in. We help you avoid all these mind boggling intrinsic details of setting up Google Apps for your domain. Our expert engineers can get you up and running in just a few hours. And for a limited time, just for $19.99.

So we hope you continue to enjoy our services and keep sharing the Google Apps love all around. And we would continue to delight you with lightning fast setup process.

Cheers,

The Easy Team

SetupMadeEasy.com