Google is currently offering schools a hosted solution for their email, calendar, and chat through Google Apps for Education, our integrated communication and collaboration solution. Additionally, you can complement the core suite to meet your users' needs, with access to dozens more Google applications.

Core Google Apps for Education suite includes:

• Gmail: Email storage and search tools that help your students find information fast and instant messaging from right inside their accounts.
• Google Calendar: Students can organize their schedules and share events and calendars with others.
• Google Talk: Students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free anytime, anywhere in the world.
• Google Drive: Share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Collaborate in real-time with your team or with your whole school. You can publish final documents to the entire world, too.
• Google Sites: Work together to keep related documents, web content and other information in one place, on one site.
• Google Video for education: A video hosting and sharing solution that enables schools and other organizations to use video as an effective medium for internal communication and collaboration.

Here are the Top 10 reasons for using Google Apps.

See a list of some of the schools using Google Apps.

Google Apps for Education is free. We plan to keep the core offering of Google Apps for Education free. This includes user accounts for future incoming students. As you may know, Google was founded by a research project at Stanford University, and this is just one way we can give back to the educational community.

To see the available features included in Google Apps for Education, please see the Google Apps for Education homepage.

For more information, you can review our Terms of Service.

There are no advertisements used with Google Apps for Education.

However, if you have an account for only alumni at your schools, you are required to enable advertisements.

Gmail also offers web clips at the top of your inbox which show you news headlines, blog posts, RSS and Atom feeds, and relevant sponsored links. Each clip displays the source from which it was received, how long ago the clip was published, and a link to access the entire story or page containing the clip. You may want to create custom RSS feeds for your University.

If you have a Google Apps for Education domain and choose to Hide all advertisements for this domain in your domain's Google Admin panel, then sponsored links will also no longer be shown as webclips. Your users will still be able to customize their webclips for news headlines, blog posts, RSS feeds, and Atom feeds.

Each service has different limits associated with it. Please see below:

• Mail: Each user has 25 GB of storage
• Drive
• Video
• Sites

With Google Apps for Education, GMail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Drive, and Google Sites are guaranteed to be available at least 99.9% of the time, ensuring that users have access when they need it. The Google Apps team is committed to providing your school with the best level of service. For more information, please see the Google Apps Service Level Agreement.

Here is a comparison chart of Google Apps for Education vs. Google Apps for Business:

Two of the most common questions regarding Google in general, and Google Apps specifically, are security and privacy. We take both topics very seriously and truly believe that our offerings are a great option for customers on both fronts.

Our business is built on our users' trust: trust in our ability to properly secure their data and our commitment to respect the privacy of the information they place in our systems by not giving that information to others or using it inappropriately.

We have an additional FAQ page regarding Security and Privacy where you can find more information.

Accredited US 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations are eligible for Google Apps for Education. Learn more about Google Apps for non-profits.

If you'd like to sign up for Google Apps for Education, please visit the sign-up page to register.

Once you've signed up Google Apps for Education, you can activate your services by verifying domain ownership. For an overview of the set up process and step by step instructions, visit http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/resources/setup/.

You can sign up yourself with the above information or contact sales for additional information. You can contact the sales team at http://www.google.com/a/edu.

If you need help setting up your account, Google Apps offers partners that can assist you with your deployment. You can contact partners at our Enterprise Solutions Marketplace.

We would also recommend going to Successful Deployments for Educational Institutions to get an overview of project planning to deploy Google Apps.

To qualify for free Google Apps for Education, we require that organizations meet either of the following criteria:

• K-12 or higher educational institution, non-profit, accredited by a generally accepted accreditation body
• U.S. non-profit organization with current 501(c)(3) status and fewer than 3,000 users.

Note: U.S. non-profit organizations with more than 3,000 users qualify for Google Apps for Business at a 40% discount - sign up here.

Student/alumni/parent groups, religious organizations, home schools or government bodies that are not registered as 501(c)(3) do not qualify for Google Apps for Education.

If you are an alumni association, church school, or research lab associated with an accredited school, this qualifies for Google Apps for Education. The easiest way is to sign up under a school's domain.

We're working to expand the availability of Google Apps for Education to international nonprofits, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, international nonprofits are welcome to sign up for Google Apps for Business, available in many languages worldwide.

If you are an educational institution and you think you qualify, please contact us to upgrade your domain. If you are a nonprofit organization, you can follow these instructions to sign up.

Yes, Google Apps for Education is available to educational institutions in Myanmar. If you'd like to sign up, see Google Apps for Education.

Some important information for accounts based in Myanmar.

• You must sign up for Google Apps for Education using an existing domain that you own. Domains cannot be purchased through the sign-up process.
• After you sign up, you have access to a 30-day free trial of Google Apps for Business while your organization qualifications are under review. If your account is not approved for Google Apps for Education, your account cannot be upgraded to Google Apps for Business. The account will be suspended after the 30 day period, and you will need to move any email or data created during this period to a Google consumer service (such as Gmail) or another service.

On average, it takes 6 weeks to deploy Google Apps. For a general outline of project timeline, please see our Higher Education Integration article. This project plan will help guide you to a successful deployment.

Yes, We provide a range of email migration options to allow you to migrate your old email to Google Apps as described in Email migration options.

Yes, Google Apps offers the Single Sign-on API that uses SAML 2.0 to integrate with your authentication system. Google Apps also offers an extensive code library for your reference while setting this up. For details about the SSO API, see SAML Single Sign-On (SSO) Service for Google Apps.

The number of users you can have on Google Apps for Education is practically limitless (as long as you aren't generating spam). You can request more user accounts via the Admin panel interface. In addition to that, we do not require you to delete inactive users.

Note: For instructions on requesting additional accounts, see Request more user accounts.

Google Apps for Education gives schools the ability to filter, monitor or archive mail using our Google Message Security Solutions.

Learn more about security solutions.

Alternatively you could choose to implement your own filtering, monitoring or archiving solution using an email gateway. This gateway allows your school to route all mail into and out of our system through your network. This gives you the ability to filter, monitor, and archive in any way you see fit.

We have developed a guide on how to implement a Mail Gateway.

We have a number of partners who can offer this service if you do not want to implement it yourself. Learn more about the partners.

We offer many resources such as online presentations and Help Centers to help you train your users to use Google Apps. To access this information, please see the Train your users section of this Help Center. If you need additional training, our partners also offer this service. More details can be found at the Enterprise Solutions Marketplace.

The Google Apps Administrators Help Center is a great resource to troubleshoot any problems that you have. If you cannot find the answer online, we offer phone support and priority email for Google Apps for Education customers.

Google Apps offers phone support for Google Apps for Education customers for issues that pertain to a service that is unusable. We define 'unusable' as a Google server error that prevents one or more users from accessing a Google Apps online service. Hours of operation are Sunday 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time until Friday 5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. All other issues will be efficiently supported via email.

More information about how to access phone support and priority email.