There are two defi­ni­tions of Google Apps: The first one, which is both offi­cial and accu­rate, defines a set of Google ser­vices wrap­ped toge­ther and atta­ched to a domain. Google...

There are two defi­ni­tions of Google Apps:

• The first one, which is both offi­cial and accu­rate, defines a set of Google ser­vices wrap­ped toge­ther and atta­ched to a domain. Google Apps exists in seve­ral forms (see pri­cing), depen­ding on who you are and whe­ther you are willing to pay — the most basic form (Stan­dard) being some­times worse than a col­lec­tion of Google regu­lar ser­vices. Even in its most power­ful edi­tion, Google Apps Pre­mier is not on par with Micro­soft admi­nis­tra­tion stack when it comes to fine-tuning deploi­ment. Well, at least it is not on par for the moment!
• The second defi­ni­tion encom­passes the prac­tice of using more than juste Google search and Gmail (per­so­nal). This is not Google Apps, but quite a lot of people (inclu­ding your boss!) may think this is Google Apps. After all, from an fron­tend point of view, there is not much dif­fe­rence (from an extra hours-point of view, there might be).

At GoogleAppsManual.com, we will use both defi­ni­tion. The main rea­son is that, for a lot of com­pa­nies, aggre­ga­ting various ser­vices may be enough. Plus, you won’t have to delve with MX migra­ting and redi­rec­tions for spe­cial cases (les­son: there is always spe­cial case ), espe­cially consi­de­ring that hand­ling spe­cial case requires Google Apps Pre­mier (wich is not free).