oogle to the rescue again after the great help and success of their Person Finder and Crisis Response applications during the Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake. Businesses rely heavily on email communication these days and if you are running an in-house mail server or simply downloading your emails directly to your individual workstations; due to the power outages, police cordons or your building being damaged this may no longer be an option. In fact I have a client that had this EXACT setup which we switched over to Google Apps for them post the Sept 4th quake who are now in this situation with the recent earthquake but are able to still access this vital communication tool. Google Apps is a great email infrastructure not to mention it gives you shared calendars and also wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools via their Google Docs application all available 24/7. It is very simple to setup and transition over to, at this point I will however point out that you will need access to the following:

What can I say, the Christchurch earthquake has been an extreme tradgedy and totally devistating to the Canterbury region and New Zealand as a nation. Having been in Christchurch on business for the September 4th quake last year and experienced the original quake that started this all we were very lucky, no loss of life and business re-opened in the CBD in a relatively short space of time... this time however it is a beast of a different nature. Being stuck here in Wellington while many of my family, friends and clients are roughing it out in the shaken city I thought I could help just a little through my skills of consulting, technology advice and blogging by offering some how-to's and advice for businesses needing to get back up and some-what operational as they start to work out "where to from here?" and start to rebuild and re-open for business. One thing is for sure, this time the CBD will not be business as usual for a very long time.