July 26, 2007 | Read Time: 1 minute
Google has announced that it is making tools available to help nonprofit groups communicate and collaborate.
Google Apps, which will be free to nonprofit organizations in the United States, includes e-mail and calendar programs, Internet-based telephone and text-messaging services, and word-processing, spreadsheet, and Web-publishing applications.
Google charges businesses $50 a year for each person who uses the tools and services.
The programs — and the data contained within them — are all stored on the Mountain View, Calif., company’s servers, so groups that use the service would not have to keep them on their own computer network. The product includes free technology advice and tools to transfer information from other e-mail and calendar programs into Google Apps.
“It’s difficult from a complexity standpoint and from a cost perspective for organizations and universities to supply those types of IT services in the traditional way,” says Matthew Glotzbach, product management director at Google Enterprise.
Google’s announcement — which was made at a gathering of nonprofit leaders organized by the Nonprofit Technology Network — comes on the heels of the company’s release of a free version of its mapping software, Google Earth Outreach.
This spring the company collaborated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to create online maps that document the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan.
“We’re always looking at ways we can take our technologies and use them to serve as catalysts for education and action in global and local policy issues for all types of organizations,” says Mr. Glotzbach.
For more infomation: Go to http://www.google.com/a/npo and http://earth.google.com/outreach.
