Control Group Blog

We are six weeks into a Google Apps pilot. Four have dropped out, there are six of us left. It’s been tough, but Stockholm Syndrome is setting in and I think I am starting to love Google Apps.

Google Apps for Business has been getting a lot of press recently — both positive and less-than-positive — so I wanted to share some thoughts on my experiences testing the platform as a replacement for the traditional Outlook/Exchange ecosystem. It’s been six weeks using Google Apps with a small group of guinea pigs here at CG. And after 10 years architecting, deploying, backing up, patching, defragging, archiving, replicating, maintaining, recovering* and yes, using Microsoft Exchange, I was definitely ready for a change and I was pretty eager to find out how the hype and marketecture lived up to a real world test.

After digging deep into Google Apps for my everyday communications, I found both some really cool features and some stinging gotchas for the average user. I also wanted to share some insight from the perspective of the administrator and the business owner. Here are a few quick thoughts on the positives…

Strongest points:

• Having one console for 90% of what I do, from any computer, Mac or PC is a relief. It’s fast, and simple. I have had enough ‘mandatory coffee breaks’ – waiting 20 minutes to have Outlook open up because it’s reindexing my local mail database.
• The document collaboration, particularly spreadsheets is really nice. It’s definitely not something to produce finished quality work, and rich change tracking that you might use for editing a contract is out, but in terms of getting an idea out there quickly, sharing it and collaborating with your team, I have not found anything simpler, faster, or easier. And I really like the paradigm of individuals maintaining ownership of documents and allowing others to edit them. File servers need to go the way of the newspaper.
• Google-powered search of my email is a no-brainer killer feature. Add Google Chat to the Google Mail window, and you’ve got an email client that’s hard to beat (though I do have one major complaint with Google Mail…. I’ll share more in a follow-up post).

Next week, I’ll share more thoughts on Google Apps, focusing on some of its weaknesses. Update: read Part 2 here.

*eseutil /R — ’nuff said