2012 Tech Review: Deploying Gmail as your Powerful Business Tool (david, lim, auckland, davidlim, 0212640000)

Should you use Gmail for your business? For a long time my answer was “No.” After all, having an email with @gmail.com on the end isn’t especially professional, especially if you’ve already set up your own website domain and want your customers to see you as something like my.name@mycompanyname.com or such.

What’s more you don’t want to change your email address and confuse/irritate all your contacts. But I was wrong and I’m now convinced that Gmail is a much better business option than Outlook or any other desktop email application. So let’s look first at what Gmail is and why it’s so good, then about how to use it with your own domain name or existing email account.

Gmail is email in the "cloud." All your email is accessed and stored online and you get to it through your web browser on any computer anywhere, even your cell phone. You’d be surprised just how convenient this is when you’re no longer tied to that laptop you drag everywhere. And with virtually unending storage you never fill up your hard drive – or lose it all to a virus or when it crashes (and it seems like there’s always a crash just before you buy a new computer).

"But what if I don’t have an internet connection and need to get to my email?" Good question. That usually happens to me when I’m in the car and need to get to those driving directions a client sent me. The answer is to enable the Gmail "offline" feature which automatically stores duplicates of all your emails – and your calendar – on your hard drive. Problem solved!

Now about that pesky gmail.com email address. Yes, when you set up Gmail you will have to establish a personal gmail account and gmail.com email. But if you go to the settings/general/accounts menu you can add any existing email addresses – like the ones associated with your website – into your Gmail account. Once you’ve set this up – and it's easy – you can send all your emails via Gmail using your business email address. To receive business emails into your gmail account just go to your email provider and set up email forwarding to your gmail address.

If you’re a very small business of one or a few people this should work great for you. If your business is a bit larger and you want all your employees on gmail but on one system, Google offers Google Apps – a more sophisticated offering that comes in both free and paid versions. We’ll look at Apps in a later segment but for now, give Google’s Gmail a try – bet you will not be disaapointed!
  

2012: The Ultimate Gmail Apps and Plug-ins for Running a Business (business, tools, tips, davidlim, 0212640000)

Gmail has been popular with small businesses because it’s easy, affordable and has a lot of functionality. But you really aren’t getting everything you can out of Gmail until you start taking advantage of some of the many third-party apps that make Gmail even more powerful. Some Gmail apps require a download; others plug into the Web version.

Regardless, if you find yourself spending a lot of your workday in Gmail, check out these apps that will make your Gmail experience even richer:

Rapportive: Rapportive kills the annoyance of sorting through windows to look up your contacts on social media while you are in Gmail. The browser plug-in saves you the hassle of having to remember who the person who emailed you is and instead looks them up on LinkedIn and Twitter – within your Gmail tab. I use it to quickly place the names and faces of the people who email me, since I’m often out meeting new potential partners for my business and get a lot of emails from our customers. Having the person’s context right there can really speed up responding to an email. You can even follow, reply to and retweet people on Twitter all within your Gmail. Rapportive is a free service.
  ScanDrop for Mac: (Full disclosure, this is our app.) We built this Mac scanner software to make it easier to scan and share paper via email. It connects many, many desktop scanners directly with Gmail (and other cloud storage options) and makes sharing easy by giving you the ability scan, preview and attach the PDF, look up a contact’s email address, and send an email all without having to open a browser. While we were building ScanDrop we heard from small business customers that they were using Gmail to store and sort documents, since it has seven times the storage capacity as Google Docs. So we added a scan and email-to-yourself option that lets you add Gmail labels for easier storage of PDFs within your own Gmail account. Currently ScanDrop costs $9.99 in the Mac App Store, although we are working on a free version.

Courteous.ly: Courteous.ly lets your contacts see how much email you are sorting through at the moment so they can be courteous about interrupting you with additional emails. Basically, the free service displays either how many unread emails you have or how many emails you have in your Gmail inbox so your contacts can get an idea of how busy you are. Courteous.ly will help your contacts manage expectations about when they might hear back from you, and it also helps them choose the best time to reach you. This is a free service.

HotSpot Shield: If you use Gmail from outside the U.S. then you may need a service like HotSpot Shield. This software lets you log into Gmail from countries that block it with a firewall, such as China. Hotspot Shield does this by creating a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop or iPhone and HotSpot Shield’s Internet gateway.  This prevents snoopers, hackers and ISPs from viewing your Web browsing activities, instant messages, downloads, credit card information or anything else you send over the network – even on public Wi-Fi. So, if you are doing a lot of work for your business on random Wi-Fi networks, you may want free software like this on your computer.

Active Inbox: Active Inbox is for business owners who manage projects or their business from within email – and who are finding their inboxes are out of control. The plug-in allows you to organize emails by project and flag an email chain by status, such as “Waiting on a Reply.”  You can also tag emails for immediate action or mark them so that you remember to deal with them later. Active Inbox also recalls your previous emails with a contact inside your Gmail window for quick reference — no need to open a new browser tab. There is both a free and premium version of Active Inbox.

Please share with me on your effort and result about using Gmail as your business tool.  If you have somethign new or some area which my posting had not covered, please let me on Twitter

Why excellent gmail signature – important tool for your business! davidlim, auckland, iPhone, repair

Use of emails for business communication is increasingly becoming popular.  You can be one business owner who might be using same email address for your personal or business/ professional communication.  There are several tools on the internet that you can use to generate good looking signatures for your webmails.  In this blog post I will introduce you to one such browser extension that does the same amazingly well. This FREE extension works flawlessly with following webmails -

1. AOL
2. Gmail
3. Yahoo mail
4. Hotmail

This plugin/ extension is by the name Wisestamp and works with google chrome , mozilla firefox browsers.  The video demo below  shows how to install and customize the plugin for your gmail / google aps mail using firefox.

Observe the video and share it with others too!!

 

This is how your use Gmail as your business email and it works! davidlim, Auckland

Using Gmail As Your Business Email
I’ve been using Gmail to handle my business email for the past few years and I’m really happy about the decision. When you use Gmail to handle your business correspondence it doesn’t mean you have an email such as yourbusiness@gmail.com; you can easily use something like yourname@yourdomain.com. The email will come to and go from your personal email, it’s just that you will be using the friendly Gmail interface to manage your email. Some of the benefits of using Gmail as your business email are:

You can set up multiple email accounts for your partners and employees under a common link: http://mail.yourdomain.com, with their own logins and passwords.

You can keep archiving the messages forever, since every email account begins with 6GB of memory that keeps on increasing.

You can either use the web interface, or use an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to manage emails. I’ve decided to use the web interface as my wife is helping me manage my projects and correspondence and we will be accessing the same email account from different computers.

Setting up Gmail as your business email
It is difficult or easy, depending on how comfortable you are changing your hosting setup. The steps involve (I’m assuming you have a domain hosted somewhere):

Signup at Google Apps and then create the email account (if you don’t create the email account now you may lose your crucial emails once the email start arriving at the new server).

Sign into your hosting account control panel and go to the section where you can manage your email and there, try to find how you can change the MX records. This link has all the procedure explained.

The changes may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet and till then you will keep on receiving your email through your current mail server. As soon as your MX records changes are properly propagated, your will be able to go to http://mail.yourdomain.com and manage your email using Gmail.

It may sound a bit doubtful, using a free service for your business email, but it doesn’t make a difference because you will still be using your old email, just with added Gmail features.