Google Applications for small business owners.

My son-in-law launched a company this month and was looking for low cost email, Document Sharing and website solution and I discovered standard edition of Google Applications which is giving more than he asked for and only at the cost of a domain registration.



I became a Web Administrator for him and it was very easy setting up gmail for his domain after registering the domain with one of Google's partner GoDaddy.com. For setting MX records I had only to enter the Customer # and password on this page and gmail at his domain started working after setting up the users.

He had made a Powerpoint presentation introducing his company and wanted it on Google Sites. I could have put it straightaway on Google Docs but it had special fonts. I opened it in Open Office after copying the fonts from his Windows machine to ~/.fonts folder on my Ubuntu box. The fonts rendered correctly but formatting on some slides was lost. After correcting the errors I saved it as Open Office Presentation on my box. I still could not upload it to Google Docs since it does not have those fonts.

Initially, I exported the presentation as Flash (.swf) in Open Office, uploaded it to Google Sites and embeded it in AnyFlash Gadget and it worked on Flash Player version 9 and older but not on version 10.

Afterwards, I exported it to HTML Document (OpenOffice.org Impress). Then I created a new presentation on Google Docs and inserted the images (created by HTML Document) on the slides and published the presentation to the web.

I could insert the published presentation on Google Sites.

This was a great 3 days experience and now I can provide services on Google Solutions Marketplace, another feather in my cap.