I use it.
Well I say "use it", what I really mean is "I use the Gmail part". That's all that's really useful, well for me anyway. I don't see any point in most of the other things they offer.
Google said:
The start page - A central place for your users to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web.
Gmail - Offer email to your users with 2 gigabytes of storage per account, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser.
Google Talk - Your users can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free -- anytime, anywhere in the world.
Google Calendar - Users can organize their schedules and share events, meetings and entire calendars with others.
Google Page Creator - Create and publish web pages for your domain quickly and easily with this what-you-see-is-what-you-get page design tool.
The start page is a good idea, Gmail is too.
I don't know anyone who uses an online calendar. Google Talk is available as a standalone program already, and Google Page Creator is only really useful if you're a n00b and can't code your own page (no offense
)
It's a pain in the a$$ in the way it's implemented too. You need to be able to set CNAMEs and MX records, which means you need to switch from nameservers to URL forwarding with your registrar (or maybe use something other than cpanel for your hosting).
That part is more trouble than it's worth. Right now I'm still using my hosting nameservers rather than URL forwarding from the registrar. I have one MX record setup in my hosting cpanel, rather than the 5 MX records Google wants, and I have a very basic htaccess rule forwarding mydomain.com/mail to the Gmail login page (
https://www.google.com/a/mydomain.com) rather than the CNAME thingy Google wants.
If you already use URL forwarding then it's free to use and easy to set up.
If not, then it's only really useful for Gmail and even then it's pretty pointless.
It's just as easy to use webmail on your domain. You still have to manually set each email account up and you only get a small logo on the Gmail page and your sitename. On the plus side, it uses their spam filtering and their servers/resources.
All-in-all, I'd say stay away. The only real plus points are that it uses their resources and it's free, other than that it's a pig to setup and the features are useless for the most part.
Not forgetting that you have to verify that you own the site/domain first. If you already use their
Webmaster Tools and have verified the site/domain for that, you still have to verify a second time for the Google Apps program.
