Web Dev Chronicles

The Google folks announced today that they are implementing a reseller program for Google Apps. I'm very intrigued. I've implemented Google Apps for a few people/organizations now and I love it. The tools, service and functionality are brilliant. Having your own private gmail interface is the biggest boon to email productivity you could imagine.

I've actually been working on some course material to teach people how to use a wide number of Google's services and plan on doing the courses at the Rich Media Institute here in Toronto over the next few months. The intent was to show people how to get started with this on their own. But I can see how some of the process might be intimidating for people.

Now I'm thinking maybe I should get setup as a reseller and go into the classes with cards in my pocket so that anyone who wants the support can get it through me. The question is simply trying to figure out how much on-call support people would need and if I can do it all by email. Based on my experience with others I don't think I'd ever have much in the way of urgent support requests.

Really I'm just thinking out loud here. This seems like a good opportunity for me to create some recurring income with a minimal amount of extra resources applied. Maybe do this in conjunction with offering basic hosting as well. I already manage one dedicated server with a few dozen sites on it. I could take on another and run people's sites on that too.

Hmmm…interesting opportunity here. I certainly am not interested in doing this on a large scale but with maybe 10-20 carefully selected customers, could be worthwhile.