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GMail Grows Up


“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what


you’ve always gotton!” Anthony Robbins


An American motivational quote in bad English is perhaps not the best way to start looking at this topic but we did say in our last article that we were going to examine the role of Google Apps (Business Edition) in changing the way in which companies think about their entire Information Technology infrastructure, not just their Customer Relationship Management software. We have to start somewhere and hopefully end up at a point where we understand the issues surrounding what is essentially a fundamental change in the way in which we all now do business. Drawing upon personal experience, when many of us first went into the property business computers were only really used by the secretary in the office, mainly to produce letters and detail sheets. If you were really tech savvy you might have been able to use a spreadsheet to add up numbers as well. Nothing really changed until the mid-90s when the Internet started to revolutionise the way in which we were all working. The Internet had been around before this time and email was starting to be a fairly common form of communication, especially in the business to business world. Company email was typically received by one person and allocated to individual staff members and the departments to which they related. As companies grew they would often move to a scenario with a central server in the largest office which hosted Microsoft Exchange Server and all staff who needed one (secretaries, admin staff and some managers) would have a computer on their desk. This movement towards electronic communication took on a life of its own. Soon, everyone needed a computer because they all had an email address and everyone needed a copy of Microsoft Office (Word, Outlook, etc) which carried with it the associated licensing cost. Whilst businesses around the world have undoubtedly gained significantly from the vision of Bill Gates and his suite of office tools this has


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not come without a financial cost. When the whole IT infrastructure required to support this situation is added to the equation the total cost is invariably extremely significant.


FROM MICROSOFT TO GOOGLE APPS At the same time we witnessed the advent of


the property portals like Rightmove and agent’s web sites became crucial in promoting their brand and their properties for sale or rent. There have also been big changes in the way agents deal with their customers. People don’t necessarily want to use letters any more, they expect the delivery of documents to smartphones and I-Pads in a format they can easily read and deal with. As such there is a new requirement for an audit trail of this information to automatically be contained within in-house agency property related computer systems. But this cannot be achieved if these emails are still expected to pass through a server which sits outside of such systems. What we are seeking to achieve with Aspasia Cloud is a fully integrated product which negates the need for separate and costly third party software tools for business communication. The emails agents send and receive from vendors, applicants, landlords, etc. are automatically allocated to the records to which they relate, ending the need to cut and paste text between different systems. However, some of the real advantages to your business in moving away from a Microsoft dependency go far beyond simply dealing with email in a more elegant fashion. We have


integrated the various Google services for things like mail, diaries and documents which allow you to run all of these areas through the core application on any platform. This completely removes the need for agents to be concerned about whether their servers are working, whether their PCs have the latest office software installed (at considerable cost) or indeed whether someone may have received an email with a virus which could infect their entire network. GMail has grown up in its Google Apps format. It is no longer a form of personal email along the lines of AOL and Hotmail. Google Apps for Business is now a full suite of products which provide all that agents need to run their offices and at a significantly reduced cost (£33 per user per year for everything). If you are currently considering an upgrade to your IT systems or infrastructure you would be wise to have a fresh look at Google Apps for Business. There are companies of all sizes across the country (indeed the world) who are doing exactly this and seeing immediate benefits both financially and in terms of time invested in keeping their in house systems running.


LOOK TO THE CLOUD


It is true that there are other considerations for some surrounding the hosting of email in the ‘cloud’. Some people are concerned about the notion of corporate data being stored somewhere other than their own in-house systems. It is recorded that Bill Gates saw the Internet in 1993 as little more than a fad and that Microsoft was “not interested” in it. But by 1995 he had warned his employees of the “tidal wave” that the Internet represented in terms of being a threat to their traditional business. Microsoft now have a hosted solution, albeit nothing like as complete as the range of Internet services available from Google who are not saddled with the legacy of a hugely profitable but dated desktop architecture to support and who have been developing their offerings over a much longer period of time. One things is certain, however, and that is that there are not many people these days who are not seriously looking at the opportunities being offered by the ‘cloud’.


PROPERTYdrum APRIL 2012 27


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