4 Uses of Google Groups as a Business Tool

By Alex Polezhaev

Not a secret that Google affects more and more sides of our lives. With the newly launched Google Sky, it claims to the world domination, not restricting itself to the planet Earth.

For running a business and organizing its processes, Google is also helpful. At Sibers, we use all Google services, including Google Maps for marking where our clients are from and planning $100 hamburger trips.

Google Groups have proved to be an extremely useful tool for harmonizing our external and internal communications. What advantages do Google Groups offer?

Storing of correspondence

When many people communicate with a client, it’s important to store all emails, chats and notes in one place. If someone gets sick, tired or fired, you can easily catch up on the project status. For each project in development, we have a separate group, which is read by all people involved: project manager, analytics, sales manager, CTO and of course a client. Whatever a project manager wants to tell a client, he does this via the group, sending an email to the group’s email address.

Substitute for a mailing list

Okay, here’s an example. Every project, in order to be properly estimated, should be reviewed by the CTO and team leaders (that’s people that lead technological departments). A standard e-mail alias would do the job (sales manager sends the brief to that alias and everyone received an email) but Google Groups has a number of benefits:

– You can easily find the needed project and check whether it’s been reviewed and estimated.
– You can put all your large attachments separately (not a big fun to receive megabytes of specs you don’t need)
– You can rate replies of your colleagues, which is important for giving them bonuses at the end of month 😉

Collaborative writing

Let’s say you and the management team need to create a document outlining main features of a CRM system to replace Google Groups. Instead of uncoordinated collecting of emails from your team members, you create a special group and subscribe your colleagues to it. When anyone creates his version of requirements in Pages, everyone gets a notification. Each person’s requirements can be commented or modified anytime.

Integration with other Google Services

With one Google account you can get access not only to Google Groups, but to all other services like Calendar, which can also be shared and used by you and your team.

If you know any other business uses for Google Groups, let us know!