About a month ago or so we ditched our Microsoft Exchange server and moved everyone at our firm to Google.
I had moved to Google about a year before everyone else but it was a hack. I basically forwarded all my Spark Capital mail to google. It was messy. I had a screwed up address book. And I had mail in gmail and contacts and calendar on the Exchange server. Like I said – it was a hack.
Now we are all on Google, the good clearly outweighs the bad although some of my colleagues despise how gmail handles “coversations”. I love it but it’s not for everyone.
I won’t list out all of the good stuff. It’s a long list and probably obvious to many.
But here are the shortcomings of an all google world. hopefully the folks in Mtn View are working on these things.
-Calendar font is too small and squished. Scanning my week at glance isn’t very useful. i usually just pull out my iphone to see a specific entry more clearly. I even have a tough time when i’m looking at a day at a time.
-Contacts. There is no way to easily share your address book inside of an organization. there is a way to share a master group but that’s not what I want. I don’t want to create a new address book. I just want to share my address book with everyone at Spark and I can’t do it.
-Gmail. Offline mail doesn’t work in Chrome. My work around is to use the native mail client on the ipad when i’m on a plane. I realize I could use Apple Mail on MacOS or Sparrow but I’m addicted to the keyboard shortcuts, starring and search. other desktop apps dont do it for me right now. maybe I should give it another try.
Like I said the good is so damn good.
I hope some of the rough edges improve and Google can address some of the stuff listed above.
I’m just happy we don’t have proprietary servers behind our firewall anymore. I like living in the cloud.