On the plus side, having a portal page for your business users (or external users such as partners or suppliers) in which you can share a calendar is a good idea for any business. And GAPE's guaranteed 99.9 percent e-mail uptime is attractive, as are 24/7 phone support and APIs for integration with your own apps. But what Google is really trying to sell are partnership products (for syncing/converting Exchange inboxes to Gmail and so on).

Given all the features and tools that come with the free Standard edition of Google Apps, businesses may have a hard time justifying $50 per user per year for the Premium edition. For 100 users, that's $5,000 a year, basically for some phone call support (which you probably won't need, the interface is so intuitive), guaranteed e-mail uptime, more e-mail storage and an API or two. We leave it to IT departments to decide if that's worth it for them.

To sign up for any version of Google Apps or get more information, visit google.com/a.