The opening of Googlemail to all is great for personal users but does not add very much for professionals and businesses.

Although an @googlemail.co.uk address is fine for individuals, the importance of a unique domain for business email cannot be overestimated.

Google Apps helps bridge this gap, with email, calendar and chat tools for up to 200 users within your domain.

This is all the more attractive with the low cost of entry - just $10 (approx £5) to register a domain at the same time, or free if you are able and willing to edit the DNS records for the domain.

Users logging on to the domain will be presented with a home page that's roughly equivalent to the Today view of Microsoft Outlook. Once logged in, users see a summary of their most recent emails along with their calendar. Just about any other information can be added to this page.

There are plenty of RSS feeds to choose from and, although many have a distinct American feel, it is simple to add your own feeds, as well as static text, images, links or Google Desktop Gadgets.

There are several basic layouts for this page and aspects such as colour and font can all be changed. More advanced editing is available for the rest of the pages and the templates all have a contemporary feel.

There is little day-to-day administration required for users. Most of the work is in setting up users for the first time, with the simplest way being to upload a .csv file containing names and passwords. If users are added individually, they can be assigned an automatic password.

Users can be given aliases as well as their own email address, while internal lists make it simple to email several users at once.

Each Googlemail account comes with 2GB of storage space, which is more than many web hosting packages. POP3 access is also possible, should you want to use email clients such as Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird.

Rather than the traditional organisation of emails into folders, Googlemail uses tags to keep track of important discussions. This may initially seem overwhelming but makes a lot of sense; many emails could quite easily belong to more than one folder. Important emails can be marked with a star and there is an effective spam filter.

The only feature that appears to be missing is the ability to only view unread emails. Entering the search term "is:unread" will do this, but it's a shame it's not a standard option.

There are some disadvantages to Google Apps, the most significant being the assumption that users will always have an active internet connection. While deskbound workers will rarely be offline, those who spend more time on the road will find it a problem. As yet, there is also no easy way to save events and contacts for use offline.

Using a service such as Google Apps also means moving the responsibility of storing all your important information to Google and trusting the company to keep it safe. Reported problems with Googlemail are very rare, but this must be weighed against how critical a company contact list is. It is also hard to limit access and a mislaid password could have serious implications.

Google Apps is ideal for the small business just starting to add employees and reluctant to invest in a Microsoft Exchange server and the attendant administration overhead. Any non-profit organisation looking to bring together volunteers would also find this ideal.