Top 5 Google Apps For Businesses

Google Apps is a great tool for most businesses, with plenty of features to help you streamline your business process. It provides solutions for managing customers, time, workplace communications, and many other things, and at only $50 a year, it’s an affordable solution, too.

However, the Google Apps for businesses platform itself is only the beginning. There are many ways you can extend Google Apps to meet your specific needs, tailoring it to your business specifically with additional web-based apps that integrate directly into Google Apps. These are available on the Google Apps Marketplace. Some of them are free, while others offer premium services for a fee. There are a lot of them, however, and you can’t be expected to test them all, forcing your employees to learn how to use new things constantly only to end up scrapping them.

To help you get started, we’re going to examine the Top 5 essential Google Apps for businesses. All but the first two integrate with your Gmail business email, making workplace communication easier and more efficient. For those of you just getting started with Gmail, you may find my guide to managing your contacts in Gmail helpful. Otherwise, read on for a list of the top five apps for businesses.

It can be almost impossible to keep track of everything you have to do in a busy office, from the various tasks you need to stay on top of, to the various meetings you may have planned.

Timebridge Meeting Manager is a simple scheduling app to help you organize your time and make sure you’re managing it effectively. It allows you to create groups for people who meet regularly to schedule easily, and it allows you to share your availability with the rest of your office to make finding times to meet with people quicker and easier. It also has phone and web-conferencing options for communication over long distances, and will provide automatic reminders to people via SMS text messaging or email that a meeting is coming up or that they are running late, as well as giving you an automatic one-click ability to inform others when you are the one running late.

Timebridge will allow you to stop wasting time planning meetings so you can more effectively spend time having them and getting back to doing the other things you need to do. Timebridge is free for the basic version, and there is also a premium version to allow access to all features for a fee.

In making presentations or touching up proposals, the basic Windows screen captures and audio captures are often not enough to get the job done right, and your employees will find they need a means to edit these images and documents.

Aviary Design Suite is a set of design tools to allow you to edit documents for your presentations. It integrates directly with Google Docs, allowing you to share your projects easily. Aviary Design Suite comes with an Image Editor to allow you to make minor touch-ups to your images, as well as a Markup Editor to let you make more detailed edits including markups such as annotations. There is also a Vector Editor to allow you to create detailed vector art for things such as logos, and an Audio editor that you can use to record and remix audio for things such as voice presentations or podcasts. Finally, there are Color and Effects editors to provide even more detailed editing options.

Aviary Design Suite provides all of the editing tools you could need for most businesses, and unlike most other editing software available, Aviary Design Suite is completely free.