Google Apps offers a rich suite of business tools that can benefit any size organization. With Google Apps, your users get an email address at your domain, tools for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, a shared calendaring system, web authoring tools, and access to dozens of other Google services.

Go to www.google.com/a and click Start Free Trial to begin. You'll need three pieces of information to sign up:

• Your organization's Internet domain name
  The domain name is the unique name that appears in the URLs for your web sites and after the @ sign in your users' email addresses. It often takes the form of your organization's name and a standard Internet suffix, such as google.com or stateuniversity.edu.
  
  
• The user name you want to use for the primary email address where you'll send and receive mail (for example, your_name@your_domain.com)
  You'll also use this email address (along with a password) to log in to your Google Apps account and manage the domain for your users, as well as access your own Google Apps services.
  
  
• A secondary email address, one that's not in your Google Apps domain
  Should you forget your Google Apps email address or password and be unable to log in and get your mail, we'll need to reach you at another address that's outside your Google Apps domain, to send you new login credentials. This must be a valid address where you can receive mail both now and while you're using Google Apps.

You can sign up for Google Apps using the domain name where you already do business or purchase a new domain name from one of our registration partners. To sign up with your existing domain name, you'll need to prove to us that you own the domain. This requires that you have access to any one of the following: the domain's DNS settings (managed by your domain host), the server that hosts your domain's web site, or a Google Analytics account for your domain.

After you sign up, we'll take you to your Google Admin console where you can log in to your new account, verify domain ownership (if you signed up an existing domain), and continue setting up services for your users.