Something i thought i'd never... gmail for whole company

Disclaimer: I havent done this, but it is compelling for those involved in a small business, or for people who dont have in house IT talent.

Lets start with a few requirements for a small business.

• You need a web page, that the uninitiated can learn to edit quickly.


• You need some e-mail boxes: sales@yourcompany, support@yourcompany, info@yourcompany, and boxes for employees. Antivirus and spam filtering required.


• You might also need an incoming fax line

Traditionally, this would require a bit of setup. But if you are willing to take a few well placed risks, you can do all this for a song. You will be trusting parts of your fate to Google, but for a very big payoff.

Ask any systems administrator what they spent most of their time setting up when they started working at their current job. Many of them will tell you it was e-mail, and web page setup, but mostly e-mail. You need to set up e-mail with anti spam and anti virus controls, and you need to do it quickly. You can invest in several completely decent solutions tied together with a custom installed mailserver, like Roaring Penguin Software's CanIT and The Venerable Sendmail, or even ClamAV Antivirus Scanner with the Postfix mail server on a Debian Linux installation, but that's a lot of effort the first time out, let me tell you that from experience. Here's how to be a hero, and how to do it fast.

Set up everyone in your company with a GMail account from Google. You will immediately think, but no one will respect a gmail.com mailing address as legit, they will think that we are small time. But dont fret, Google has decided to make your life easier in a way that the self posessed AOL took years to approach. They have added the capability to set your Reply To: address on the fly, and to retrieve your mail using POP. Here's how it works.

First you will register a domain name, lets call it yourcompany.com using 100megsdomains.com. Why do we use them? A Marco Carag kindly pointed out, they have built in DNS and simple MX forwarding built into their service. This means you can, just using their service, set up mail forwards for your domain. You will set up forwards from employeename@yourcompany.com to the_employee_address@gmail.com. That way customers can send e-mails to an official looking address, and you can still recieve it at your GMail account. You will automatically get the benifit of GMail's virus filtering and anti spam, along with unmatched e-mail conversation viewing (where all previous messages in a conversation are displayed with the most recent).

Traditionally, this works great for recieving, but not for sending, as most webmails will only send out e-mails with the webmail address as the sender. Gmail however lets you specify "accounts" which are basically the full e-mail addresses you would like to send your mail as. You can use their "Settings" panel to add accounts, so that you can send messages as employee@yourcompany.com, or what have you.

The Website
Now you need a snazzy website to go along with your new e-mail addresses. Enter DreamHost with their really reasonable hosting plans, along with free domain registration if you pay yearly. The most important thing here though is that DreamHost offers 1 click MediaWiki installation. The Mediawiki software lets you create your own website in a dynamic and organized fashion that your customers will appreciate. Some people that have run with this idea are The Mono Project (a software project) and JeepersDen ( an offroad parts store). You can even get someone to develop a custom Mediawiki theme that will give your site a very coherant and easy to read appearance.

Sidenotes
I made no mention of file sharing, but there are some totally decent online file storage and collaboration services out there that you need to check out. Box.net is one of the top players in the arena, and you get the benifit of being able to access your files from home and work without issue.


References:

• http://www.gmail.com - best webmail service ever


• https://dreamhost.com - really decent webhosting


• http://www.100megsdomains.com/services.asp - domain hosting with DNS capabilities and e-mail forwarder