Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) now has the Google Apps Marketplace. In my last post on GAFYD, I listed out some of the benefits for using GAFYD in a small business, team or even if you just have your own domain. The Apps Marketplace is yet another compelling reason for small (and even larger) businesses to use GAFYD.
There is an amazing array of Apps to choose from, and so many competing apps, that it actually makes it quite hard to choose – see Project Management Apps for an example. But if there are apps that your businesses has been currently using, you may now be able to integrate them with your GAFYD account. For example, TripIt is one of my favourite online apps (and one of the few that I pay for the premium version of) – it allows me to track and share all my travel details online. With TripIt for GAFYD you can now arrange and share trip information for all members of the team – all with your regular GAFYD login.
The apps in the Apps Marketplace can integrate with GAFYD by having a Single Sign On, Gmail integration, Calendar integration, Docs integration or a combination all of these. Interestingly however, at the time of writing this post, there is only one App that has Gmail integration and that is Jira Studio by Atlassian, and it only has read only Gmail integration, so there must be some difficulty for the apps developers to integrate fully with Gmail.
The easiest way to find apps in the marketplace is to click on the “Search Marketplace” button with no search criteria. Then you can use the search filters to refine the search from there. Alternatively refine the search first by clicking on one of the categories from the home page and then use the refine search criteria to limit the display within that category.
There are many free apps, but mostly they are paid SAAS apps that now just integrate with GAFYD. There is also a very confusing array of “professional services” which is people trying to sell you support hours for Google Apps and Enterprise Search Apps that are only for large enterprises. I would really like to see the enterprise and service offerings more separate from the Apps and a way of filtering for only the Free apps.
Where the Google Apps Marketplace will be very useful is for small business to integrate some of their other Line of Business apps into GAFYD. Apps like CRM, project management, time tracking, expense reporting and even Accounting (although Saasu is a notable exception at the moment, but they have said they are looking into it).
As more and more apps come into the marketplace it is going to be great for anyone using GAFYD as their business platform.
