Google Apps for Nonprofits
by Michael HoffmanMonday, July 23rd, 2007
If I was a nonprofit CEO or IT director, and I wasn’t totally over invested in Exchange Server and I didn’t have more than 100 people, I would go with Google apps for email and shared calendaring. Google apps allow you to have web-based service at your own domain running on Google servers and for free. Google, in partnership with NTEN, just announced that they have extended the additional features of Google Apps for education to all 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.
For all of you folks struggling with servers and infrastructure, some advice: Buy less servers and Microsoft and spend the money you will save on more bandwidth.
Here’s a note from Google that was in the most recent NTEN Connect newsletter.
Jess Daniel, Google
IT infrastructure is hard work for any organization. Having worked at a nonprofit prior to coming to Google, I know that the combination of long-standing legacy systems and limited resources certainly doesn’t make things any easier. Now that I’m member of the Google Apps team, I spend my time working on simple but powerful communication and collaboration tools for organizations. And so it’s with special satisfaction that I share this bit of news: Google has extended the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)(3)s.
You may already be familiar with Google’s standard suite of free hosted services, including private-label email, calendaring, and online-document sharing. But the Education Edition offers a number of value-added admin features at no additional cost, including email migration tools, phone support for critical issues, and extensibility APIs. (Ads are also optional, in case you’re curious.) There’s no need to take my word for it, though: if you attended NP.IT recently — the Google-NTEN midsummer mixer — you may have bumped into a few nonprofits with their own Google Apps success stories.
At the end of the day, enabling good works through Google Apps — in any capacity — both inspires and humbles us. We’re excited to offer this worthy sector a low-investment, feature-rich IT choice. Find out more or apply for an account.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:14 am
With Google Apps Education Edition you can sign up more than 100 users, I think you can have many thousands (I would check with Google on this.) So if you are a 501(c)3 with more than 100 users sign up as well.