What are the benefits of multiple sign-in to Google accounts for a small business?
Working on your favorite Google products just got a whole lot easier for small businesses, as the search king recently launched a new feature that lets users sign in to multiple accounts at once. What a thing? Definitely. Small businesses should be able to do much more thanks to this new luxury.
Convenience and increased productivity
Until recently, accessing multiple Google accounts was typically accomplished by opening more than one browser. For example, if you were viewing one in Chrome, you would have to launch a browser like Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Safari to open another one. This was due to the fact that Google used login cookies that essentially forced users to log in to only one account at a time. The improvement has made it a simple process that can be done by simply opening a few tabs on the page you are viewing. Thanks to the new feature, you can sign in and view your appointments in Google Calendar, all without having to close the article you were viewing in Google Reader. This simple convenience could help small businesses be much more productive.
View personal and business email
Gmail is a very popular email application that has more than 100 million users. For those who use this service for both personal and business purposes, the multi-login feature is a welcome gift. Instead of having to log out of your personal account to find out if you’ve received a response from a new customer, you can multitask by working on both accounts at once. With the feature enabled, switching back and forth is as simple as making the appropriate selection from the dropdown menu at the top of the page. No more relying on tedious plugins and tricks. Your personal and business email can now be managed under one roof.
restrictions
While the multi-login feature offers great benefits, it’s not perfect and has its limitations. At this time, the feature is only available for select Google products. These products include Calender, Code, Gmail, Google App Engine, Reader, Sites, and Voice. You may have noticed right away that Google Docs is not included, although support for this product is said to be coming soon. It’s also worth noting that the feature doesn’t work in offline versions of Gmail and Calendar, as well as Google apps on mobile platforms. If you want to get the full functionality of Gmail and Calendar offline, it is highly recommended to leave this option disabled.
As a new feature that just launched, there are some issues with multiple sign-in, but Google says it’s working hard to fix them and make the option available to users on all platforms as soon as possible. For now, the sheer simplicity and increased productivity will probably be enough to suit many small business users.