Google today rolled out its full versions of Google Apps, which is essentially an online IT infrastructure managed by Google.

I mention this because our agency has been a beta tester since mid-November and I've found this to be a great service. It is something that may well be appropriate for PR agencies and communications organizations of all sizes -- but particularly small and midsize organizations.

Basically, Google gives you:

• a start page all your team members can access online, including customized content (such as links to outside services like media directories), and access to your email and calendar
• a Gmail account that uses your own domain. You use the Gmail client -- which has excellent spam filtering and other features -- for your own email (name@yourcompany.com). It also supports POP access for Palm Treos, other email programs, etc.
• Google Calendars. This is big, as each person on your team not only gets his or her own calendar they can access online, but you can also share calendars among team members
• chat using Google Talk. We don't use this much as we tend to have Skype active, but it is nicely integrated into Gmail
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which is an online word processor and spreadsheet program you can use to share and collaborate on documents across your team -- and store them online. (This was just integrated so I haven't tested it as part of the package, but I like using it as a standalone app.)
• there's also a webpage design and publishing tool, but I haven't used it.

The real beauty is this is all online, so you can use your Google Apps with any computer that has Internet access and a browser. You're no longer tied to your desk, and no longer have to maintain a lot of office software.

Google is offering both a free edition and a paid, premier level that has additional support and other advantages, including a whopping 10 GB of email storage for each account. The free edition has 2 GB, and I'm far from filling even that...

Personally, I decided to try this with our firm when I found myself spending a great deal of time fighting the spam email deluge that began late last year. I decided to see how Google would handle it, and it's been great. Now, I've got one of the best tech firms on the planet handling my IT, freeing me to focus on communications -- which is what I love to do anyway.

IMHO, one of the most exciting aspects of Web 2.0 and the technological advances of the past half decade or so has been that it has enabled small, entrepreneurial organizations to operate more efficiently and compete with much larger companies. Google Apps takes this another step.

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