How Google can help you kick start your project

If you are starting a project or a business and you don’t have too much money, this could be a good read for you 🙂

We are starting a new project. We have created a team of few guys. Each of us is  located in different city/country/continent. As with many projects and with kick starts not having to much money means that we can’t really rent an office where anyone can come to or spend a lot on cool software.

The obvious decision is to do all the stuff remotely. We still need software for knowledge sharing, meetings, etc. Skype can help us with conferences calls. What about email, calendar, documents and so on.

The obvious answer was, go for some free open source tools. But, for email, calendar, wiki, etc. we will need to host it somewhere. It also needs to be globally accessible and reliable. Seems like Google has some answers to all of that 🙂

GMail

Possibly the best web based mail in the world. Quick and with huge storage. I don’t think I would have to delete my emails ever 🙂 It also has Google search integrated. I don’t have to organize it to much, I can always search for what I’m looking for. It also comes with integrated chat.

Google Talk

Integrated with GMail or works as a standalone client. Quick and simple chat, great for office communication.

Google Documents

This is absolutely awesome idea. Create, view and share documents with whoever you would like to. It reads and creates MS Office Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets and Power Point presentations. You can also view Adobe PDF files. There is also a facility to organize them in folders.

Google Calendar

Organize meetings, put dates of all the important events, etc. and then share them with all your fellows team mates. Calendar sends a reminders to your GMail account.

Google Sites

WIKI like service. You can define and invite its administrators and contributors. It integrates with Calendar so you can put some events on it. It integrates with other Google services like Images and YouTube videos.

Google Code

Useful for Software projects but only available with one of the Open Source licence.

Other stuff

There are also other services potentially useful for the start. Blogger, Reader, Maps, Groups, Picasa, Translate.

All the services might be useful for sharing and searching through a huge amount of information that Internet contains.

So, we are starting something. Not having to much money but having Internet access we can use Google. Its there and it always will. Reliable, simple and fun to use. Go ahead and give it a try if you haven’t yet 😉

Greg