Never one to shy away from experimenting on the family, converting to Google Apps at home seemed like an interesting learning experiment.
My experiment consited of
- Gotta have a domain, rumfordhills.com as you no doubt guessed
- Also had it hosted at bluehost and added a few toys like wordpress
- Gave everyone a rumfordhills.com email address
- Signed up for the free Google Apps edition
Lessons learned:
- Google Calendar is pretty neat. Set everyone up with their own calendar, imported my son’s school calendar (ASU has their academic calendar available on Google) found a lotus notes-to-google calendar sync tool and now everyone in the family can see everyone’s schedule.
- Google Mail. I found it easy to switch from outlook to Gmail. Having the Google mail reader pull in all my email accounts makes the migration easy and their migration tool loaded all of the email from my local outlook folders with no problems. For those younger family members who don’t really like email anyway, lets just say user adoption is lagging behind 🙂
- Google Mail Contacts. One restriction of the free version is that you can’t share contacts. Would be nice to have the family address book be shared. But I wouldn’t say that it’s worth upgrading to get this feature.
- Google Docs. It’s nice to store files at Google and not worry about what computer your logging onto, or to review and collaborate on homework projects. But I can’t say I’d ever recommend converting to google apps. Libre Office or MS Office is a much better choice, but you loose the online collaboration and browser based editing.
- Google Apps. Tripit it a nice way to get those travel plans posted to the calendar. StreamWork from SAP is now available, it seems like it would be fantastic for small teams, like school projects or a small business that needed to do some collaboration.
After using Google Apps for a while and building some intricate spreadsheets that import data from external feeds I’ve noticed that
a) Google Spreadsheets are slow
b) they break easily — I dread the Google Error Messages…
c) they limit the number of external links or imports you can use
d) they work better in IE then in Chrome! nothing like the rows not aligning with the selected cell
e)they work better in IE. Faster, more stable, rendering is more accurate…..
I’m in the Beta list for MS Office 365, and am looking forward to seeing if using the cloud version of Office is better.