Nowadays, small businesses are working towards making communication easy and quick without increasing their budgets. In a modern business, suppliers, offices, employees and customers can be spread across the world, which demands effective communication and collaboration between them all.

Though large firms often pay for expensive and outdated systems, such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, small businesses find Google Apps a better option. Google Apps comes with ease of use, is budget-friendly and provides high quality solutions that are easily managed. In brief, Google Apps gives you all the features of Microsoft Exchange and more at a very affordable price.

A number of small companies have been benefiting from the multiple advantages offered by Google Apps. Google Apps security is key among the many benefits that a business will enjoy. If you don't know about Google Apps yet, it's time to try it out. The features associated with Google Apps that help in enhancing the productivity of your business and reduce costs at the same time:

1. Business Email: With Google Business email there is no need for you to manage your own mail server. You can utilize your own business domain for email and benefit from the Gmail interface for your employees. Your employees can check their email from anywhere and can get a storage capacity of 25 GB per account, great spam filtering, sync capabilities with Outlook and Blackberry and other features found in Gmail.

2. Google Calendar: With this application you can get smooth online collaboration with shared calendars, appointment scheduler, SMS notifications, integration with emails, and syncing with mobile equipment. Google Calendar security makes sure that the your data is not being misused.

3. Google Docs: Google Docs lets you manage your documents, presentations and spreadsheets online, thus removing the hassles of sending and receiving the documents again and again with your peers for changes. Two more great features are edit notifications and Version controlling.

4. Google Groups: This application enables you to communicate with members of a group simultaneously. This application allows you to share docs, mails, calendars, sites and videos with your colleagues within the group.

5. Google Sites: This application helps you to build secure, coding-free web pages for company intranets and group sites. With this you can organize all your information in a single place.

6. Videos: A large number of videos can be hosted and streamed by Google. Hence, your users won't come across any issues while sharing their videos over email or burden IT with a complicated on-site video application.

The most important concern for any business is its security, and Google Apps security is unparalleled. Google Apps are also convenient to customize and install. You can even modify the look of Google Apps by adding your company logo and by using custom colors. However, if you encounter any issue while setting up of these services, you can hire professional to take care of it for you.