I have been trying out Google Apps in the past few days, like most services from Google it’s excellent.

Google Apps is a unified messaging application or should I say platform. I came across it while searching for third party email hosting companies. Email hosting is part of the core services Google Apps provides in addition to Calendar, Instant messaging, search and other services.

What I find most exciting apart from all the services that come with it is that Google host it all on their own hardware free of charge, you do not have to worry about hosting bills.

You can either use your own domain or buy a new domain name from Google, which they register through Godaddy.
Though you can use domains bought from another company, make necessary changes to you MX records and Google Apps will be set up for you, the limitation to this is that is a complicated process, using a domain bought from Google speeds up the set up process up. The domain I bought from Google to set up this service was set up within 30 minutes with all services working.

Here are the services that come with Google Apps:

* A start page which links to the rest of your services
* Gmail-like email facility
* Google Talk
* Google Calendar
* Page creator

Though all the above sound fantastic with it is, it has some limitations. The maximum number of users it supports is 200, so you really cannot use it to provide free email service, which is what I was researching when I come across it.

There is no sign up page or a way to make your users register for the service; you the administrator have to add all two hundred users manually. Your scope for customisation is also limited, you can not fully customise/label it as your service because there is lots of Google branding all over it. When your user logs in to your domain, the URL usually changes to something like google.com/domainname but over all its a nice freebie from Google.

You can find more information about Google Apps at the url below
Google Apps homepage
Google Apps support forums