Google Apps Standard vs. Premium

Google Apps has made a recent splash as a cost-effective, cloud computing apps for email and messaging, document storage and collaboration, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations.  Google Apps come in two flavors for businesses: Standard and Premium. 

The Standard edition is free, ad-supported with basic features and a 7GB email storage limit.  The Premium edition costs $50/user per year and has many more features like smartphone support, live tech support and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

Regardless of which edition you choose, you can run your entire organization on Google Apps and keep your domain name (i.e., yourdomain.com). Here's what you what you get with each edition.

Standard	Premium
Free, ad-supported	$50/yr per user
no Outlook Sync	Syncs with Outlook calendar, email, contacts
7.3GB email storage	25GB email storage
no SLA	99.9% uptime SLA
no SmartPhone support	SmartPhone support
no archiving	email archiving up to 10 years (Postini)
50 user limit	no limit
no tools	Email migration tools
no routing or email gateway support	Email routing and email gateway support
online self service support only	phone and email support from Google

Other Google Apps Premium extras include Google Groups and Videos (similar to YouTube), forced SSL encryption, custom password strength requirements, and other features.

AXICOM is a Google Apps Reseller and we provide setup, migration and on-going support services.  For more information or to learn how your organization can benefit with Google Apps, contact us at (818) 865-9865 or info@axicom.net.

Google Android Phones Gain in Popularity

According to a recent report from comScore, Google's Android is the fastest growing smartphone platform and made up 7.1% of the smartphone market in January 2010. 

RIM's Blackberry smartphone maintains a significant lead over Apple's iPhone with 43% and 25.1% market share, respectively. 

iPhones growth continues but at a much slower pace, increasing only 0.3 points in the last quarter. 

Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform slipped 4 points but still holds 15.7% of the market.  Palm smartphones, which appear to be dying a slow death, fell 2.1 points to 5.7%.  

	Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
	Oct-09	Jan-10	Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
RIM	41.3%	43.0%	1.7
Apple	24.8%	25.1%	0.3
Microsoft	19.7%	15.7%	-4.0
Google	2.8%	7.1%	4.3
Palm	7.8%	5.7%	-2.1

Source: comScore: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/3/comScore_Reports_January_2010_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

Google Mail: Put Your Signature In It's Place

If you use Google Mail or Gmail, one annoyance is that when you reply to an email that your signature doesn't appear directly after your text but at the BOTTOM of message after the quoted text.

 

If you would like your signature to appear BEFORE the quoted text and directly after your reply message, follow these steps.

1. Go to your Google Mail inbox (http://gmail.com or http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com).

2. Click on Settings in the top-right corner.

3. Click on the Labs tab.

4. Scroll down the page until you see "Signature Tweaks."

5. Enable "Signature Tweaks" by check the "enable" box.

(Hint: Check out other lab gadgets because there are a few handy ones on that list.)

After you save your settings, your inbox will reload.  The next time you reply to an email, your signature will appear directly after your message instead of after the quoted text.  You will also notice that the two "--" hash marks no longer appear.