If you’d like to see a bit more of the changes, or you’re just interested in what the Google Apps Admin Console does in the first place, there’s a handy YouTube video and a whole lot of information available on the Google Apps site.

Most of our clients don’t need to use the Admin Console since we handle pretty much everything for businesses under 10 people, but it’s available if you’d like to access it. If you need any assistance with the console, whether or not you’re a PureNyx client and regardless of which version you have access to, or if you use Google Apps and would like to share your experience with the service, please contact us or leave a comment below.

The first part of this focus is the “What We Do” statement. At PureNyx, this part seems simple.

What we do

We design and maintain amazing websites.

This is really our specialty. In some form or another, Jaime and I have been creating and supporting websites for the last 15 years. (I’ll admit, I’m older and been at it a bit longer than her.) Our target clients are small businesses needing a simple web presence, professionals wanting integrated scheduling or event management apps, or specialty communities. Our site design services use off the shelf WordPress components with high levels of look and feel customization, in order to create sites that are both beautiful and cost effective. Our managed hosting service ranges from simple maintenance of sites to full management of content and community moderation.

We develop and produce brand resources.

We configure and support Google apps.

A lot of businesses stop after this part. They assume that a solid “What We Do” statement covers every situation and clients will automatically infer “What We Don’t Do”. Unfortunately, things are usually a bit more complex. In real life there are a lot of exceptions to every businesses’ “What We Do” statements.

At PureNyx, these exceptions mean that we don’t take certain clients or projects even though they fall into our scope of services or seem reasonably similar.

What we don’t do

We don’t support violence or hatred.

If we feel that your business, brand, or website are not in the best interest of whatever community you impact… you’ll have to work with someone else. We will not support racism, bullying, or the promotion of products or services we believe to be harmful. Our definition of harmful also includes any sort of copyright or intellectual property violations.

We don’t violate our partners’ Terms of Service.

While the web seems to be full of folks who bend the rules at every turn, we strive to maintain an extremely high ethical standard. Our hosting and technology partners have terms of service that may prohibit activity about which we don’t have a particular opinion. Most notably, this includes the Google Apps prohibition on explicit content. We will uphold policies of this sort.

We don’t develop comprehensive digital media strategy.

We don’t produce marketing material, design websites, or provide services to investment firms.

We can’t guarantee with PCI, HIPAA, etc.

We can offer a high degree of protection to your users and help you utilize compliant third party service where necessary, but we don’t certify that we can help you support any particular regulatory requirements.

***

Taken together, the “What We Do” and “What We Don’t Do” statements are the starting point for successful client communication. At PureNyx Design, they are the first things we consider in discussion with prospective clients. If you don’t have these down pat for your business, you might want to get on it!

You work in California. You have employees in Texas, Minnesota, and Virginia. Or maybe your offices are closer together – across the city or state, or further apart in different countries.

You need to be able to keep up to date on your employees schedules, copied on important emails, and share documents easily, but right now your systems, programs, and applications are a scattered and haphazard system. You have a cloud storage system to share files. A system for emails, but no shared calendar. A program to create documents and presentations. And you have periodic conference calls or webinars using yet another system.

You’re on the go and need a file while you’re out so you have to copy it from your computer to your laptop/tablet/phone into another app and then when you get back to the office you have to transfer changes back by hand because the app and the program don’t sync up.

It would be great to tie them all together under one roof and be able to keep tabs on and access to the important things related to your business.

Enter Google Apps

If you take Google’s free services, bundle them together, and add a dash of business management, the end result is Google Apps. I’m not going to go into any great detail about the different solutions that Google Apps offers. You can see it on their official page: >>Google Apps for Businesses<<

Instead, I want to touch on three key points that we have found the most helpful and useful with Google Apps.

Email

Google Apps email service is built on the same exact platform as their Gmail service, but instead of using an @gmail email address, it uses your company’s domain which is great because it keeps the branding to you.

Now, think. How many times have you ever heard of Gmail being down, or emails being delayed, or emails just disappearing? I’m going to guess it’s not very often. At the beginning of April, Google released a blog post about their email service availability for the year 2012. They guarantee a 99.9% with zero scheduled downtime for maintenance. For 2012, they achieved a 99.983% availability. They’ve managed to reach this goal for the past 3 years, too, so they have a nice track record for reliability.

Google Drive

With Google Drive, you have a cloud storage system that allows you to create files like documents and spreadsheets (in fact, this blog post is being drafted in a Google document), upload files of any sort, make folders to manage everything in your Drive, and download it for your PC. The download is nice because it creates a Drive folder that automatically syncs with the cloud system so you can use it for important automatic computer backups as well.

Drive can be used to store all sorts of documents too, not just ones created within the application. You can store Microsoft Office or Adobe files and open them within Drive to view, or if you’d like to edit them, you can convert them into the Drive equivalent file type. You can also store images or zip files – pretty much anything you can save into a folder on your PC you can save into Drive.

Plus, Drive has the ability to share your documents with anyone – people within your company or without with just a couple clicks.

Hangouts

I know, you hear the word “hangout” and it’s fun sounding. That doesn’t sound right for a business application! But you would be surprised. When you work from home or in a situation where you’re not located in the same place as your other employees, it’s hard to figure out the important factor of face-time.

Hangouts give you that opportunity. Not only can you have face-time, but if you have something on your computer that is more easily explained by showing, you can share your screen. Hangouts allow up to 15 people at a time right now.

There’s also the option for Hangouts On Air that will allow you to record a hangout for later viewing – which could be useful for training purposes.

Here are a few great reasons to switch to Google Apps. Let PureNyx Design get you, your employees, and your computers connected with Google Apps. Contact us today, and if you have any stories to share, leave a comment below!

Of course, I know that being the driver for a modern race team actually would make me part of a large corporate mechanism. When I make the comparison between racing and small business, I’m thinking more of the sport’s early history instead of the huge race teams of today. Like the pioneers of racing, I’m both the driver and the mechanic. I send my vehicle hurtling around the track, but I’m also the guy who pops the hood if something goes wrong. I can’t focus exclusively on any particular part of the machine, but I know the whole system in a way no specialist can.

Any tinkering I do with PureNyx’s systems is based on intimate knowledge of its operation and is tested exhaustively. I expect a lot from any new components I add. I even invented a few of them. And I’m not afraid to tear down my own creations if they don’t measure up. In fact, I am outright obsessed with monitoring the performance of our system. I want to know that the apparatus behind PureNyx is working well both for us and for our clients, so I watch over three gauges of success: reliability, ease of use, and site speed. These may sound like goofy buzzwords for “do a good job”, but I actually have specific metrics for each one. A recent change to our system dramatically improved all three.

Returning to our racing analogy, we’ve been running a stock, general purpose engine for the last couple years. No matter how we tweaked it or what aftermarket parts we added, it would never measure up to a purpose-built racing motor. In other words, while we only build sites using WordPress, we were hosting them in a server environment capable of running anything. Now that we are using a service tailored specifically for our sites. The results have been phenomenal.

A complete description of the improvements would be part technical treatise and part exposition of my often overly particular nature, but it’s simple to sum up. On the reliability front, we’ve increased the frequency of our backups, reduced the time required to restore service in the event we need to use them, and established a new schema for disaster recovery by preparing our service for the possible replacement of any one of its components. As for ease of use, we’ve reduced the steps in our process for configuring new sites and improved the organization of our client interface. Most of all though, we’ve introduced a new world of speed to our service. Our best case site response hasn’t changed all that much, but average page load time has fallen several times over.

You’ll be hearing more about the reliability improvements as we provide more detail on our disaster preparedness and business continuity plans over the next month and the ease of use issues will become a bit more apparent when we roll our our support portal at the beginning of next month. In the meantime, everybody should enjoy faster sites!

And, of course, if you ever do need assistance is updating your website, we are here to help!