SMB 2019 Technology Recommendations from Doggone Good Technology #1
John Ohman • January 6, 2019
Using the Googlesphere (or Microsoft if you prefer)
If you're establishing a new business venture (or are already running an established business), we think you should establish a Google (or Microsoft) account in your business name. Here's how - just create a new, free Gmail account using your business name as the address. For example if your business is ABC Widgets, open a Gmail email account for the address ABC.Widgets@gmail.com
We suggest just using your business name to establish a "regular" Gmail account. It's free and should meet most of your needs for starters. If later on, you need even greater business functionality, you can upgrade this to a full-fledged, reasonably priced, G-Suite account (more about that in a future post), but you probably won't need it to start out with. With this one simple step, ABC.Widgets becomes a Google account with functionality across a broad spectrum of technology products including:
- A "business" email address. OK, so it's not really a business email that comes from your business website domain, but it's commonly used by small business. Most importantly, it's separate from your personal email. If you're concerned about having another email account to check, we can help you set up both accounts in the same email application.
- An "office applications suite" with documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides, etc. All work at least as well as the most common uses of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc, but have even better collaboration capabilities if multiple people need to contribute to the final product. While the files in Google are proprietary and not in the same format as Microsoft Office files, they are readily converted to "office format" for sharing with Microsoft based systems.
- Online file storage of 15 GB. It syncs with your local PC and provides adequate storage for most. But, if you need additional storage capacity, it's readily available for a very reasonable cost.
- A "business" calendar. Each Google account comes with a calendar. In this case, it can be particularly useful for your business. Google calendars are easy to "embed" in your website - meaning that you can display a "live" version of this calendar right on your business website. We can show you how.
- A Form Creation/Survey system that allows you to create and distribute polls, surveys, questionnaires etc and automatically collect & save the responses.
- Unlimited storage of your business photos (at standard resolution - adequate for most online uses)?
- A free separate business phone number. We can show you how.
Although we prefer the "Googlesphere", if you want , you can do many of the same things with the Microsoft equivalent called Office Online (We won't provide specifics in this post, but if you're interested, reach out to us for full details).
Well there's actually lots more, but we've just tried to cover the highlights. The point is, as a small business, you should take advantage of available free or low-cost technologies to make you more effective and efficient.
Doggone Good Technology is dedicated to making technology work for you!
