Update May 2010: Google Sync now supports push email, not just calendar and contacts. More info

We have previously recommended Google Apps as a great solution for your business email needs.

Google Apps works great while you’re in the office, but what about when you’re on the road?

For years it’s been possible to access your Google apps email on your mobile device, but until now there hasn’t been an easy way to keep your calendar and contacts up to date on your computer and your mobile.

Google has recently announced a new feature  – Google Sync:

Google Sync (beta) is now available, and allows two-way push sync of Google Calendar and Gmail contacts data to iPhone and Windows Mobile devices through ActiveSync. Two-way contacts sync is also available for devices that support SyncML.

This allows you to easily keep your mobile phone’s contacts and calendar up-to-date with your Google Apps calendar and contacts.

Need to schedule a new meeting while out of the office? Add the meeting to your phone’s calendar and it will automatically be added to your Google calendar.

Just added a new phone number to your mobile? It will now be available on your Google contacts when you return to your desk.

No longer is it necessary to maintain two separate address books and calendars.

More information on how to set this up on your mobile device is available here.

Google Apps calendar and contacts sync available for iPhone, Windows Mobile and more

We generally recommend that our clients use Google Apps for their company email. It’s a great way to get email @yourdomain.com without the hassle of running (and paying for) your own mail server.

Up until recently, Google allowed up to 100 user accounts (using Google Apps standard edition) without having to pay a cent.

However Google has recently decreased the standard edition user limit from 100 to 50 for any new Google Apps signups. Existing Google Apps accounts are unaffected by this change.

For those of you who are planning on setting up Google Apps for your domain, keep this new 50 user limit in mind. If you require more than 50 accounts, you will have to use Google’s premium edition.

If you are yet to use Google Apps for your company’s email, you can set it up yourself or we can set it up for you.

New Google Apps Standard Edition 50 user limit

Apple’s launch of MobileMe is notable. Is it relevant for small business?

Hard to say, as it hasn’t been released, just announced.

But in a nutshell, no, it is not suitable for small business. Apple could (and probably will) address this in the future however.

I’ve discussed recently that we use Google Apps for our business mail and calendaring. For a whole bunch of reasons mentioned in Simplify your Email Life, so I won’t go into them here.

Apple say that MobileMe is Exchange for the rest of us. Curious. An individual is a lot further away from Exchange than a small business.

MobileMe is an extension of the .mac service, which has never been aimed at small business.

With MobileMe, Apple give us a new browser based email interface. But also calendaring and address book. Sort of like Google Apps.

Apple’s MobileMe service syncs to Mac Mail and Outlook. You also get integration with the Gallery features we have had in Mac, which make it easy to publish galleries of photos to the web.

It runs from me.com, which is a cool domain to be sure.

But it is not a small business application. Businesses want to run their own domain email, such as joe@joesdomain.com. And they need an easy way to manage multiple emails.

Have Apple addressed spam? One of the biggest reasons for going with Google Mail is the spam filtering. If Apple can do as well as Google on this front, then they will earn loyal users of their mail service.

Having used .mac and sync services for some time, I am sceptical that it will be a smooth experience to replicate data across iPhones, Macs and PCs.

And having stopped using desktop mail and calendar apps, I no longer see any reason to replicate information around. Just keeping my mail box and calendar in one place makes sense, all I want is to get to it from anywhere.

My guess is that once people start to use browser mail and calendaring on their iPhone, a lot more people will make this move.

One final thing from a comparative perspective – Google Apps is free. MobileMe costs around $99/year, per user.

The iPhone is a huge device for business, and I will get one when it finally arrives in Australia. It will let me run my Google Apps based mail and calendar.

One day, Apple might offer a small business oriented version of MobileMe. But we aren’t there yet.

MobileMe looks like an incredible consumer application, and I look forward to it thriving.

Apple MobileMe – not for business

Email is the lifeblood of business.  But man, it sure can hurt at times!

Just think of the pain we put up with:

• toxic spam (by the truckload
• it stops working and the technical jargon that hits you is almost worse than the spam!
• clogged mail boxes meams time wasted trawling and deleting old messages
• changing ISP and having to notify everyone of a new address

And of course when you have a small business the problems are magnified, because when your team has problems with email, you have a problem.

The pain of email forced me to change the way I did things. And yes, there is an easier way.  After more than a few email exchanges and conversations, I wrote up an article on how to Simplify Your Email Life.

I hope it eases the pain.

Email Hurts Like Hell