Gmail for Your Domain

I recently mentioned to a colleague that I wished that I could manage email from my work Exchange Server account through Gmail. Although this isn’t exactly what I meant, imagine my surprise when he forwarded me the link to Google’s new beta Gmail hosted service. The idea here is that Google will set up Gmail for your domain, so that you can have domain-specific email accounts, and they will “manage” them for your entire company.

Of course, given that Google already manages all of Gmail, I can’t imagine what more there is to do in this case. I assume all that’s really going on here is that rather than needing to have email passed to an intermediary (in my case, my email address is with my web hosting company, and it forwards straight to my Gmail account), users will simply sign up for a Gmail account with their domain email address.

I’m accomplishing the same thing for the most part so this doesn’t seem all that earth shattering, but I can see how for some smaller companies that don’t want to bother with Exchange servers this could be a real boon. Combine it with 30 Boxes, Basecamp, Writely, and DabbleDB, and you have one hell of a powerful Web 2.0 office suite. And you can simply pick and choose the best of breed services from different developers.

I can’t wait to see these services become more open over time and share information more freely.

[tags] Gmail, Google, Gmail Hosted Service, 30 Boxes, 30Boxes, Basecamp, Writely, DabbleDB, Web 2.0 [/tags]