Signing up for Google's Microsoft Office Killer

Signing up for Google’s Microsoft Office Killer

By Larry Dignan February 21, 2007, 11:19 PM PST

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Signing up for Google’s Microsoft Office Killer

Paying up for Google Apps

Google Apps Premier has launched and it plans to take on small business customers. Should Microsoft be worried?

Google may undercut Microsoft Office with its business apps subscriptions for a mere $50 per account a year, but there are a few fine print items to consider. Here’s a look at the sign-up process and where I hit trouble spots. Step one: Forking over the dough. That’s easy enough.

SLAs are key

Since this is a hosted service I was very interested in the service level agreement. Here’s the link. Unfortunately…

SLA meets 404

…it didn’t work. Could be a deal breaker for some.

Easy admin setup

Here’s the administrator account setup. Looks easy enough. One big problem: I don’t have a domain name. The help page says there’s an option to get one if I sign up for Google Apps Standard and then upgrade to premier. For giggles I proceed with the domain name I used to own.

Dashboard is nice

A pretty snazzy dashboard. Again though I have to verify my domain–which I don’t have–or get a new one.

Verify that domain

This verification gets a little complicated for sole proprietors or anyone that wants Google apps sans the ads.

Dashboard fiesta

More dashboards. Very Google-ish with a simple interface.

Domain hell

Stuck in the domain loop.

Settings galore but...

These settings will be swell once I find a domain name.

By Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief at Celonis. He was most recently Vice President, Editorial and Editor in Chief at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and

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