Over the past few years I have found myself increasingly utilizing core components of the Google services infrastructure.  More often than not I will ask myself how this reflects on a data hosting / web hosting services firm when we are outsourcing some of our internal operations to the Google platform.  The below reflection provides a good example as to how one service provider can leverage the open tools provided by another service provider within a very broad and dynamic industry.

Here is what I now find myself using on a daily basis:

iGoogle – A fantastic method of organizing your start page essentials – stock quotes, news headlines for my favorite sources, weather for my primary locations and many other useful tools to assist me with everyday tasks.

Google Docs – Within our organization we have a need to keep certain aspects of network and infrastructure documentation within spreadsheets.  These easy to reference datasets allow our engineers to make quick adjustments in our facilities, followed by immediate updates to the documentation — updates which become aggregated into the system(s) we use for network monitoring and resource management.  What was previously a set of iWork Numbers spreadsheets in an company webdav directory have now found themselves in the google docs services.  Ease of navigation, ability to have multiple users edit the document at the same time, and the eradication of client side spreadsheet software on our mobiles/workstations are several of the reasons we have found Google Docs to be a tremendous resource for our teams.

Google Adwords / Analytics – Self explanatory here, we use the google adword program when we are advertising specific products to bring in customers not currently familiar with our namebrand, and we use the powerful analytic stats to keep track of the activity on our various web assets.

Google Calendar – I keep a personal calendar, a calendar which is shared amongst the people closest to me in my personal life, and a calendar for key team members that need to be aware of events, conference calls and other activities.

You’ll notice each referenced URL is https — Google is kind enough to let users access their software as a service with the comfort of encryption.

You’ll also notice that we are not using Google Mail / GMail…

Google email and spam filtering services, though incredibly useful and used by many of our web hosting customers, does not appropriately fit within our organization’s requirements.  I have seen competitors of ours, small and large, take advantage of Google mail services both free and paid versions.

Our organization requires the flexibility of having a complete inside view into the activity of the mail servers which handle networkredux.com and accounts.networkredux.com (our CRM / ticketing system).  Being able to review and parse through our own maillogs is reason enough for us to manage our email services.  Our requirements are not as stringent when it comes to calendaring and document sharing.

Google’s software as a service provides excellent toolsets and environments that business owners can use for day to day tasks.  From an operations standpoint we have made attempts with Zimbra and Scalix, neither of which provide the same ease of use as Google services.

Thank you Google for providing easy to use and open tools which complement the Network Redux service stack quite nicely.

Thomas Brenneke
Network Redux, LLC