Google Apps – A Case Study

Every person who has ever been associated or heard of small business knows that in small business every dollar has to count. The small business person has to think smart to survive. Google has created Google Apps which is a set of tools that are excellent resources for the small business owner.

Google Apps Standard Edition is Free or the Premier Edition is $50 per user account per year. The Standard Edition is loaded with everything that I have needed for over a year. I recently moved to the Premier Edition for the Postini email security.

Google Apps has a number of tools. The tools that I consider the most useful to my business are Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. These tools are a beneficial to me because they can be implemented without the overhead of having a data center, VPN’s or expensive software.

Here is one case study to how my Office Manger and I can collaborate using Google Apps. Friday afternoon I have planned my activities for the following week and input my appointments on my calendar. I can also input the address of where I am going and Gmail shows the location on Google Maps in the appointment details. Monday morning I take my laptop and hit the road. I am scheduled to be with my client at 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM that day and my afternoon is open. While I am working with my existing client a new client has called and would like for me to visit them in the afternoon. My office manager goes into her calendar and she can see that I have the afternoon open. She also gives me a call to confirm that my afternoon is open. She can then enter into the calendar the name of the client, address and their phone number. I have Google Sync installed on my Blackberry which then synchronizes my updated calendar. My Office Manager also creates and shares a case file for the new client in Google Docs. I can open the file on my laptop, my Blackberry or any computer that has internet access. After my meeting with the new client I can update the case file for the new client. My Office Manager can now view the latest information about the client, how many billable hours I worked and how we can serve the client in the future. All of this was done without an Exchange server, file server or Microsoft Office.

To read in detail about Google Apps go to: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

Adam Bell
Sublime Computer Services
We make your technology work.

615-942-0850
www.sublimecomp.com

Personal Backup Software

There are a number of personal backup software packages out there. There are image backups, backup to disk or ROM, tape backups and online backups. With all of these choices it is overwhelming to a user which backup they should use. I personally recommend a double layered backup system.

Most people may think that having two layers of backup is going to be expensive or not necessary. That is not true. Services and software are much cheaper than they were in the past. As far as being necessary just wait until you have a single hard drive crash or a operating system go south on you and the only solution is to have the Geek Squad indiscriminately wipe your hard drive clean without even asking. All of those MP3's that you legally downloaded or resume that took three hours to build are now gone.

Ok. On two the good stuff. For a home user I would recommend a two fold backup system as follows:

1. Acronis True Image Home Edition $49.99 - http://www.acronis.com/
2. External USB 500 gb Hard drive to store your image backups. $139 - http://www.tigerdirect.com
   
3. Mozy Home $4.99 per month unlimited data backup - http://mozy.com/

How it would work:

1. Install Acronis on your computer to make an exact copy of your computer as it sits. Create the Acronis boot disk. (Done from Acronis in the start menu) Acronis can schedule or manually backup the computer while it is running. You want to let it do it's job while you are not in the middle of yours. Why would you want to run an image backup? Let's say you have a hard drive failure. You would go out and buy a replacement hard drive put the new hard drive in your computer. Boot the Acronis boot disk and restore the image of your old hard drive back on to your computer. Now you are back online. Acronis is also useful to recover a single file. If you overwrite or delete a file that you needed you can browse the backup drive, look for the last backup that had that file and restore it. For a single file it take about 30 seconds. You need to check your backups from time to time to make sure the disk isn't full or that backups aren't occurring because of some error.
   
2. With Acronis covering your assets why would one need another backup? Sometimes we assume a backup has been running and we have not just taken a look to make sure backups are happening successfully. We have a failure, lo and behold the last successful backup was 18 months ago. In some cases a computer and hard drive could be water, fire,virus or child damaged. Now you are looking for your Mozy Backup. Once you purchase Mozy you download the small Mozy client and install it on your computer. Choose the folders you wish to backup. Since Mozy allows you unlimited storage you can backup everything. Mozy does not allow you to backup the operating system. The inital backup can take days to complete depending on the amount of data you have on your hard drive. Once the initial backup is complete the daily backups will happen quickly. Mozy is web based. Now you can restore files and folder from anywhere.
   

This should give you a good idea of what you should do. You will need to go to Acronis and Mozy and get more in depth installation and usages instructions. Acronis and Mozy both have enterprise versions that are much more expensive.

Don't let your recovery be a disaster!