Now Google has introduced an industrial-strength version, Google Apps Premier Edition, designed for businesses of all sizes (read: targeted at the enterprise). GAPE (an unfortunately acronym, we'd say) costs US$50 a year per user, which includes a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for e-mail, additional e-mail storage (10GB per account instead of the 2GB limit of the Standard Edition), and new administration and business integration features.

Getting started

There are several ways to get started. If you already have a domain name that you can control (you must, for example, be able to add a subdomain whose name Google specifies), you can sign up for the Premier edition directly. During setup you specify the domain name, and wait up to 48 hours for Google to verify the domain. If you already have a domain and a hosting service, you can sign up for the Premier edition, upload a one-line HTML file to your home page, and wait up to 48 hours for Google to verify the file's existence.

In either case, you must choose the number of users you want to support and pay $50/year for each using Google Checkout. A free trial is in effect until April 30, but during signup you must supply a credit card, which will be charged later.

The last way to enroll (which we chose) is the speediest. As part of the signup process for the free Standard edition, you purchase a domain ($10/year) using a Google partner such as GoDaddy, and pay for the domain using Google Checkout. Once the domain purchase is confirmed (in less than an hour), you choose the "Upgrade to Premier Edition" option from the Standard edition admin screen, and the Premier environment is up and ready for you in about two minutes.