Travel & Tourism Technology Trends

Prerequisites:

In order to successfully complete this daily action, you will need:

1. A domain name that you want to use for your business email.
2. Ability to add DNS entries or have your web administrator add DNS entries. For more information, please refer to this Google Article.
3. An existing email address at which you can receive login credentials.

Estimated Time for Completion: 30 mins – 1 hour

Details:

The Google Apps for Business (Standard Edition) is, in my opinion, by far the most reliable email platform available on the web.  The Google Apps platform is based on the award winning Gmail platform and provides a huge amount of on-line email storage per account, excellent spam filtering, and the convenience of web, desktop, and mobile email access.  All this and the standard edition is free.  For more powerful features and additional storage, I recommend you upgrade to the Premium edition which will cost $50 per user per year, still a very reasonable cost for an enterprise level email solution.

The main benefit of using Google Apps is that the service is not tied directly to either your domain registrar or your hosting provider.  This spreads out your risk and ensures maximum up-time for your various services.  For example, if your hosting provider goes down, you don’t lose your domain or your email.  If Gmail goes down (which is not likely), you don’t lose your website.  The main point of failure is your domain registrar, so it is important to make sure you pick a reliable one. If you plan to have a third party developer create your website for you, you may want to ask them to take care of this set-up for you.  They will probably be more comfortable with making the necessary domain changes then you will be.

To sign up for Google Apps Standard Edition, you will need to follow these instructions:

1. Go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
2. Click on the “Get Started” button.
3. Enter your domain name. Remember, you will need to be able to modify your MX records.
4. Complete the sign-up form.
5. Check your email for the Google Business Apps verification email.
6. Update your MX records according to the instructions provided in your Google Apps set-up. Refer to the the DNS Management Requirement article at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60214 for more details.
7. Once you have updated your MX, verify that your account is live.
8. Log into your new email account.

The Google Apps for Business (Standard Edition) is
free to use but is limited in the number of users and
size of mail box. It is more than adequate for most
small and medium sized tourism businesses.

Outcome:

If you are successful at completing this daily action, you will have set-up Google apps for your domain and have fully branded email powered by Gmail.