IT infrastructure is hard work for any organization. Having worked at a nonprofit prior to coming to Google, I know that the combination of long-standing legacy systems and limited resources certainly doesn't make things any easier. Now that I'm member of the Google Apps team, I spend my time working on simple but powerful communication and collaboration tools for organizations. And so it's with special satisfaction that I share this bit of news: Google has extended the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)(3)s.

You may already be familiar with Google's standard suite of free hosted services, including private-label email, calendaring, and online-document sharing. But the Education Edition offers a number of value-added admin features at no additional cost, including email migration tools, phone support for critical issues, and extensibility APIs. (Ads are also optional, in case you're curious.) There's no need to take my word for it, though: if you attended NP.IT recently -- the Google-NTEN midsummer mixer -- you may have bumped into a few nonprofits with their own Google Apps success stories.

At the end of the day, enabling good works through Google Apps -- in any capacity -- both inspires and humbles us. We're excited to offer this worthy sector a low-investment, feature-rich IT choice. Find out more or apply for an account.