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My wishlist on GApps

GApps, earlier known as Google Apps for your domain, is a service by which you can primarily create simple webpages as well as run your own email service, using Gmail engine. Fellow blogger Nirmal has a post on '7 Reasons Why you Should be Using Google Apps'.

Google has both free and paid versions of this service, targeted towards Organizations, Schools, Families etc. I was pleasantly surprised that even former President Abdul Kalam is a user of GApps (Check out an MX lookup on www.abdulkalam.com). Wow, what an endorsement!

As an admin of GApps for my alumni network, I give good marks to email service. I have the following wishlist:

  • Improve the Email List (aka Distribution list) management. Currently if you have to create a 200 member DL, it is quite a pain.
  • Credentials Distribution: If you upload a CSV, GApps does a good job of creating the users. However, you are left with an CSV sheet where you have to mailmerge and inform the users through email. Very tedious task. Ideally, I would love to see one more column in the CSV format capturing alternate ids of all users, and then leave it to GApps to mail the new login credentials to all users automatically. In one shot.
  • Blogger Integration: Wordpress currently facilitates GApps Email integration with Wordpress.com blogs hosted on domain. Not sure why Blogger does not seem to step forward on this. Top of my list.
  • Common Footer message: Would love to see the feature of a common footer message that will be appended to all messages/all new messages.
  • Googlepages:The website maker is extremely basic and needs very significant improvement. The limitation on the ability to HTML edit the pages completely is something that should change.

On the whole I give high marks to GApps.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The web page maker is very basic. I think Google likes only basic html pages. Thanks for the mention.
Anonymous said…
Having just converted to a MAC and realised that most of my prospects are still using Windows, Google Apps has been a lifesaver for me. It has less functionality (especially the Spreadsheet app) and is still a bit flakey but I love it nonetheless because it allows me to easily write and share documents with my partners prospects and clients.