Commercial Insurance Blog

Business Owners: Consider Google

As social media engineer, I spend most of my time on the internet where I run into lots of great tools. Lately, I’ve become a bit of a Google addict. Now, most computer users are familiar with Google’s incredible search engine, but are unaware of the whole host of formidably effective tools that Google offers FREE. Google’s innovations have been so useful to me; I decided to write about them.

Business owners should operate with google and commercial insurance from andrew gordon inc

Google Chrome:

I’ll start with the big guy. Most PC users use Internet Explorer for web browsing …I’m so sorry. As someone who dealt with the frustrations of IE for many years before switching to Firefox and then Chrome, I can highly recommend Chrome as a replacement. Google Chrome is lightweight, offers fast web browsing that works seamlessly with Google applications and offers applications for download. It also feels incredibly intuitive to use; you could download it today and wouldn’t notice a huge difference from Internet Explorer, but deal without whatever problems and bugs are plaguing the latest version of IE.

Google Documents:

My personal favorite. The idea is that you can store and edit your documents through Google, which is incredibly useful for business:

  • The documents can be retrieved from any computer with internet, and can be categorized into folders like your documents on your hard drive.
  • Where Gdocs hit it out of the park is with sharing your documents. You can choose to give anyone else with a Google Account rights to view and/or edit your document. You can even have multiple people working on a document AT THE SAME TIME. For real.
  • You can save documents in a wide variety of formats, including PDF or HTML
  • You can upload your Microsoft Word documents straight to Google Docs
  • Let’s say you’re working on a group project, and after editing a document for weeks, you decide your version that you had last month was better. Good thing GDocs allows you to access the complete revision history of the document, and recall it from any of its previous stages
  • Everything that I said above also works with PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets that you’re familiar with in Excel are available for use in Google though their spreadsheet function.

Google Calendar:

Another incredible feature. You can create an online calendar of your tasks and events, which can also be shared with anyone else with a Google Account. You can also create several color coded calendars to organize your events. It can even send you notifications through email or to your smartphone. I’ve used Google Calendar to organize my life for about a year now. When someone asks me for my availability, I just email them a screenshot of my week, print out a copy for their desk, or share it with them directly. I can even choose to only share my work schedule with them so they don’t know that I marked the Mythbusters marathon for watching!

gmail good for businesses, wikipediaGoogle Mail:

I’m not going to spend any time raving about Google Mail, but I would urge you to at least check it out. It’s just as great as the other tools and just as free.

 

Google Reader:

For those of you who manually check your favorite blogs and websites, join the 21st century and open a Google reader account. You can add the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and websites and receive all your updates in one user-friendly application. I used to read the newspaper, but now read my news feed. It’s like my own customizable news feed from my favorite columnists, authors, and bloggers.

Google+:

This is Google’s new social media system, still in beta. Getting an invite is tough right now, but if you’re in, you’ll notice that it’s an upscale, cleaner Facebook. Instead of having 768 friends that see everything you do, you put your friends into circles then publish each post only to the circles that you select. This is so my family doesn’t have to see my school-related posts, and effectively eliminates the awkward 60-year-old-aunt-flora-commenting-on-every-status-you-post syndrome. Facebook does offer these tools as well, but they’re little used and frankly, Google just does it better. Google plus also offers group video chat and the ability to separate your news streams by your circles which is refreshing. Again, Facebook does offer a similar service, but it takes some headache to put in place. G+ also includes a feature called Google Sparks, which partners with Google’s search engine to match your interests with random content from the internet that it thinks you’ll like; it’s usually right. Basically, while it still has some catching on to do, Google plus represents a cleaner version of Facebook paired with the brute functionality of Skype and the addictive nature of StumbleUpon. If you can, check out Google plus.

What’s really cool is that if you choose to use all of these Google services, you can manage almost everything important though Google. I rarely have to open external programs anymore. Google does it all.

Tip of the Hat,

CF

 

Corbin Foucart. Andrew G. Gordon Insurance

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