I have been using Outlook since the beginning of time. It has always been good to me. I even hopped on the Office 2010 beta and eventually purchased Office 2010 when it was released. I have several machines, not including my smart-phone (previously a windows mobile phone, now the DROID 2), so naturally I wanted to be able to sync all of my contacts, tasks, notes and of course mail between my systems. Because of my fondness for Outlook I had decided to purchase a $10/mo exchange mail box hosted by myhosting.com. This worked great for a long while. Eventually, however, I decided to investigate new approaches (getting tired of paying $10 for a single mailbox for functionality I believe should be freely available at this day in age.
Enter Google Apps. I had a debate with an open-source person a while back who was saying they hated exchange and thought there was no reason everyone shouldn’t use google apps. I decided to investigate google apps a couple weeks later. Now, I’m not “against” google apps any more than I am “for” MS exchange. The only thing I am truly a proponent of is the stuff that has the most functionality, that works the best and that costs the least.
Setting up google apps was a reasonable breeze. All I had to do was setup a google account for my domain and update a few DNS records. I was amazed at how thorough Google Apps’ (I’ll call it GA) setup guide was; I found a guide for just about every major DNS record management company under the sun. Once I had the DNS records in place for my domain, google had to update their servers for an hour and then BAM, everything worked. Within one hour I had a hosted calendar, documents, task list and of course mail.
As much as I like Google’s interfaces for docs, calendars and mail, I am still tied to an offline email client (specifically outlook). For some reason, the idea of always having to be attached to a browser just doesn’t sit very well for me. Perhaps it is the limited desktop integration that bothers me, not being able to drag-and-drop messages/files, etc. I’m not sure. I know one thing for sure though: Often enough I don’t have access to the internet and need to lookup a contact or an old email. Beyond that, some of the features built-in to outlook (especially 2010) are really nice. As far as I’m concerned, let Google focus on the back-bone services and let Outlook handle the user-interface.
In any event, setting up Outlook to work with my new Google Mail, wasn’t too bad; after all, Google Mail supports IMAP, which Outlook inherently supports. All I had to do was punch in the incoming and outgoing servers for Google and change a couple advanced options (ports, primarily) and Outlook started downloading my IMAP headers right away. The bigger question to me was how to get my contacts/tasks/calendar to sync between my machines…
At this same time, I had just purchased the DROID 2 and let me tell yah… It worked beautifully. Instantly after registering my google account with my DROID2 phone, all my contacts, calendar items, tasks and mail synced up to my phone. It is amazing how quickly the sync process occurs, too. I can update a contact on my phone and within a few seconds it gets updated on my gmail contacts.
Getting back to my sync’ing issue, I tried Google Calendar Sync, but found that it didn’t support contacts, tasks and notes (which are very important to me as well). Finally, after some in depth research, I stumbled upon gSyncit. What a GREAT piece of software. KUDOS to the David Levinson for making such a wonderful piece of software. After installing the software, I found an additional add-in/plugin within Outlook and was able to setup synchronization for ALL of my desired items (tasks/calendar/notes/contacts).
Because of big load of contacts and calendar items I have though, it took about an hour for my first sync, but once that was done, I was able to update the sync settings to perform the sync every 15 minutes and to only sync a 31 day surrounding range. After doing so, the sync process only takes about 10 seconds to perform and you can even have it hide the sync window so that it can do it behind the scenes for you.
Unfortunately, the gSyncit software costs $15 per computer (not per person), but it was well worth the buy to me. Thinking financially, I went from $120/year for a myhosting.com exchange account, to $0 for GA and $45/lifetime for the tool that syncs all my machines together. In addition to that, in the event that I don’t have an Outlook-enabled machine, I can always access all of my stuff from a browser. 🙂
Note: When setting up task synchronization through gSyncit, I had to select “Hosted” for the google account type. It would not verify the account information if I did not specify “Hosted”. ‘not sure why I didn’t have to do the same for the other types of synchronization though…
In summary, as an individual, Google Apps works great for me and my needs. I believe Google Apps would even be a great solution for many small companies that can’t afford the full Microsoft system. However, when working with a larger (more corporate) companies, I would still suggest MS Exchange for the simple fact that setup on a per-user basis is a lot more simple. GA is an excellent solution for a company that needs a basic IT infrastructure, can’t afford (or doesn’t need) a full-blown MS solution and can afford a little more employee training time (to learn about the gSyncit tool and the quirks of IMAP), while MS Exchange is the best solution for a corporation that requires a more advanced IT infrastructure (including more flexibility with roles) and can’t afford to train each employee on the quirks of IMAP and how to use gSyncit.
Note: I have also setup GA for my family’s company and it seems to be a big hit. They are all really liking it quite a bit. The only thing I can think of that google should fix is the cookie management betweeen different Google Apps websites (IE: I have to logout and log back in to switch between my GA account and my family company’s GA account and ALSO between my personal gmail account).