GOOGLE APPS - WHAT ARE THEY?

BackStage integrates with Google Apps to become an organisation-wide management system.  You can see online demos of the power of Google Apps on our Demos page.  click here >>

Google Apps are a set of office tools from Google that allows organisations to store, view, edit and share documents and other information online.  Documents can be created in a number of leading office applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice and then uploaded.  Alternatively they can be created directly inside Google Apps.  Users can then decide which documents they wish to share with other members of their organisation.  All documents can be viewed from any computer with internet access or downloaded and viewed offline.  The contents of the documents is entirely private and is not read by Google.

2434.com in no way acts as a reseller for Google Apps and all support issues rest with Google.  However, we believe all orchestras through out the world should take full advantage of its immensely powerful features.  For a full explanation visit the Google Apps home page.  We provide here a brief overview of some of its more compelling features for an orchestra.

Cost
Google Apps is available as both a completely free online application (Google Apps Standard) or else as a low cost enterprise solution (Google Apps Premier)  The Premier edition provides more storage space, more customer support and, more importantly from our point of view, more scope for BackStage to interact with it.  We will later be providing an option for Google Apps Premier accounts to seamlessly intergrate with BackStage WebPages.  However, for the moment, all the BackStage/Google Apps integration tools work both with the free Standard and Premier editions.

Master account and users
An orchestra would typically open a master account and create user accounts for each member of staff that each have the facilities outlined below.  A Google Apps master account is associated with a particular domain name such as www.MyOrchestra.com.  An orchestra may wish to use their own domain name if they want Google also to host their email.  Alternatively some orchestras may wish not to have Google host their email account but purchase a separate domain name for their Google Apps account.  Staff are added to this Google Apps master account as new email addresses for this domain (i.e. user1@MyOrchestra.com, user2@MyOrchestra.com etc..)  Each staff member then effectively has their own Google account.
NB using the orchestral domain name for a Google Apps account does not affect your website and wherever that may be hosted.  For instance the 2434.com website is hosted on our web servers but our email and Google accounts are hosted on Google servers.

Google Calendars
Each staff member account includes a Google Calendar.  BackStage automatically updates these calendars for each staff account with the latest schedule details.  These calendars are fully editable and viewable online.  They also have some astoundingly advanced capabilities such as the option to share any chosen event with other members of staff, to be viewed on a mobile phone, to export their content to other calendar applications such as Outlook so that they can be viewed offline.  They can even be updated by SMS text or alternatively notify you of up-and-coming appointments by automatically texting your mobile phone.  Welcome to the very latest in location free office technology.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Each free user account includes 2GB of document storage space.  All BackStage document output is in compatible file types that can be stored within Google Apps.  In 2008, BackStage will be giving its users the option automatically to upload all contracts, pay advice notes and letters to the orchestras Google Apps account(s).  These documents are then stored offsite on Google servers and only viewable by chosen members of the management team.

Gmail
Each staff account has it's own gmail account for email.  These appear like any ordinary email address (support@2434.com is a gmail account) but provide the staff with an extremely powerful communication tool amongst themselves and for sharing contact details.  Gmail can be read online or else downloaded to a mail client such as Outlook like any other email.  In 2008, BackStage will give it's users the option to send all email from a chosen gmail account for all multi-users allowing all sent and recieved email to be viewed from the same mailbox rather than spread across multiple mailboxes.

Google Talk
Some orchestras may choose to take advantage of Google Talk to communicate with each other in real time.  It is fully integrated into the gmail system.  Once you start to use it, you may not want to stop using it.