FREE Applications for your website from Google and MS Live

Are you looking for a dedicated email solution for all your employees, or if you are a media company looking forward to publish hundreds of pages to your portal on regular basis, in any case these applications from Google and Microsoft Live are just right for you.

What applications are available for my website?

Google hosted applications for your domain includes their popular services like GMail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Page Creator. Another such offering is from Microsoft Live, offering FREE dedicated email solution and their messenger service for your domain.

Google mail offers 2GB and Microsoft Live offers 250MB mailboxes for every user of your domain.

How will Google hosted apps and Microsoft Live work with my domain?

You don’t need to install or setup any of these applications on your website or in your current hosting account. These are hosted by Google and MS Live in their Data Centers and all you will have to do is make minor changes to your domain records for it to work.

After you sign up for the program with either Google or Live, you will have to make changes to the DNS and Mail Exchange [MX] records of your domain. When done, any email addressed to an email account of your domain will be redirected to either of those providers.

In simpler terms, you will be changing your domain records such that all email related services will be redirected to Google hosted servers instead of your hosting provider’s server.

Is it easy to setup users and manage them?

Google and Live both offers a control panel after you sign up with their program. Using the panel you can create user accounts and distribution lists consisting of those users. You will then select services you want for your domain. If you only want email then that could be the only service you will select and then activate it.

Product Tour from Google - [https://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/tour.html]

How will my employees access these services?

Google based services can be accessed using:
Email: http://mail.google.com/a/[your-domain.com]
Calendar: http://www.google.com/calendar/a/[your-domain.com]

For Microsoft Live based services, simply login to Hotmail using user@[your-domain.com]

Where to obtain more information from?

Google hosted apps - http://www.google.com/a/
Microsoft Live apps - http://domains.live.com/