2. Shrink Your Inbox. Gmail groups messages and their responses into conversation threads.  This keeps the responses to messages in context of the original message. No more trawling through weeks or months of emails to figure out what is going on.

3. Works from Anywhere. Sync your calendar and mail with your smart phone or tablet so that you can work from anywhere.  You can also view your docs from smart phones and many of them even allow you to make edits. Time for your thumb drive to join the floppy disk and the VCR in the museum of electronics.

4. Email as a Dashboard. Using Google Gadgets and Labs you can view your Docs, calendar events and tasks without ever leaving the Gmail webpage. For the adventurous, Google Labs provides an almost endless supply of productivity tools, all accessed from your Gmail page.

5. Group Subscription Settings. Maximize your efficiency by receiving emails from a mailing list in a digest form so that you can read all of the information at one time.

6. Share Email Address with a Google Group. Use a Google Group email address to share a mailbox and reply-from email address.  This is a great stepping stone for a support or customer service team that isn’t ready to roll out a dedicated help desk solution.

7. Manage a Project with Google Sites. Create a Google Site to host and mange project files, calendars, tasks and documents. This is as easy as using email or writing a presentation, so no need to involve IT in complicated intranet configuration tasks.

8. Replace mass email requests for information with Google Forms. Use Google Forms to quickly and efficiently collect information from employees, customers and individuals.  A survey can be written and distributed to unlimited people in minutes!  All of the data is collected instantly and summarized in a Google Spreadsheet.

9. Save time and reply by chat. Use the built in chat to quickly respond to message or share information.  Your contact will see the information right away!

10. Share Collections Instead of Files. Rather than individually sharing each file, just share the entire collection.  Each time you make a change to a doc within the collection, your editors and viewers will instantly see the change.

11. Promote Your Company with a Public Calendar. Create a calendar of speaking engagements and events to attract new clients. Publish the calendar as “publicly viewable” and share it on your website and in your newsletters.

12. No cell reception? Use Audio Chat. Need to make a phone call but your mobile phone doesn’t have any reception? You can use Google Chat to place an outgoing phone call to any of your contacts – even if they are offline!

13. Use Google Docs as a Web Drive. You can now upload any type of file to Google Docs. Use your Doc List as online storage space for important videos, images, files, and data sets that you can access from anywhere, anytime.

14. Save time responding to emails with the Canned Response lab. Do you send the same email response over and over? Create and format the message, save it as a “canned response”, and drop it into any email with one click of the mouse.

15. Share internal video messages securely. With Google Video for business, you can host and share videos within your business’s domain. Messages from the CEO, training modules, and new product releases are great things to share through video.

16. Record and Share Meeting Notes via Google Docs and Calendar. Create one Google Docs to store all notes for a particular meeting and attach it to a calendar event. Everyone in the meeting can edit and view the docs for months or years to come.

17. Share Company Letterhead via the Template Gallery. Upload your letterhead and branded collateral to your domain’s private template gallery. This way, you ensure that everyone is using the same images, colors, and company information.

18. Teach Gmail to Put Priority Messages at the Top of Your Mailbox. Using the Priority Mailbox feature, you can mark messages either “important” or “not important”. After a few days, Gmail will automatically place new messages that you consider important at the top of your list of messages.

19. Quickly find important information sent to you by chat. Did someone send you a phone number or address via chat? Find it quickly by typing “is:chat” into the Gmail search box along with a few words that you remember from the chat session.

20. Collaborating on a process flow diagram with a coworker? Use Google Drawings and collaborate in real-time. Then, add the completed diagram to a Document, Spreadsheet, or Presentation.