Sage Insights Session – GEN43 Using Google Apps for Project Management and Customer Collaboration

Sage is holding their annual partner conference, Insights, in Denver, CO in May.  I am presenting a session at the conference entitled Using Google Apps for Project Management and Customer Collaboration (GEN43) on Monday, May 17th at 2:30pm.

Although this conference is only available to Sage partners, I will be conducting a webinar on this subject later in May.  Everyone is invited to attend that webinar.  We will be sending out the details (date, time and GoToWebinar invitation) via our newsletter, blog and Facebook fan page.  The webinar will include an introduction to Google Apps, how it can dramatically reduce your IT costs, how it has changed our company and why cloud-based apps are the wave of the future.

I have invited the Sage partners who have registered for this session to comment on this article to encourage the sharing of ideas, opinions and questions about Google Apps (and cloud computing in general).  My goal is to make the session a collaborative one and to make sure we cover the topics of the most interest to the group.  Here is the abstract from the Insights website:

Google Apps are a low-cost, easy-to-use and effective tool for managing projects of all sizes.  With Google Apps you can manage e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, presentations and collaborate with customers and colleagues.

So far, my proposed agenda is to cover these topics:

• What exactly are Google Apps and why should I care?
• A brief look at what’s involved in implementing Google Apps.
• How have Google Apps impacted our company?
• How have Google Apps impacted our interactions with our customers?
• How we are using Google Sites (a component of Google Apps) for project management.
• What is the future of cloud-based applications?
• How will the cloud affect our businesses and our customers’ businesses?

My intention is to make this session as interactive as possible.  The apps themselves are not complex and I am pretty sure none of us wants to go through a long demo of exactly how to create a document or a spreadsheet.  So, I am emphasizing how Google Apps in particular are changing our world.

Dialog about the project management aspects of Google Apps is also a main component of the session.  I believe that every project (no matter the size or complexity) can be managed through Google Sites using the tools from the Sage Consulting Academy.  And I will be going through real-world examples of how we are using those tools.

To date, there are 31 people signed up!  I am really looking forward to hearing from many different perspectives within the Sage community.  Partners who work with pretty much every Sage product (I think the only exceptions may be Timeberline and MasterBuilder) are attending this session.

Please let me know what you think about the proposed agenda and if there are some other topics you would like to talk about.