Moving to Google Apps

Update: As you are reading this article keep in mind the principles of minimalism (excellent read from Zen Habits) and apply that to ditching your email client. You might have to learn a little something new but few moving parts means less complexity and less opportunity for things to break, and ultimately less work for you to manage your digital life.

If you’re still using a mail client it may be time to move on. If you feel more comfortable accessing your mail locally I understand but when it comes to web-based applications email is the most established solid application there is. There are also several advantages to using web-based email clients as opposed to desktop apps. By the way, I realize you may not have a choice if you work for a corporation so think of this in regards to your personal or small  business emails if you don’t have the option at your day job. I’m going to focus on Google Apps for this discussion and assume you have a website or domain that you get email through.

If you aren’t familiar with Google Apps for Your Domain,  it is (as you might expect) a set of web applications that you can use for your domain. The most obvious and useful of which is Email, followed closely by Calendar (though there are several others). The thing not a lot of non-techies realize is that your website and your email can be tied to the same domain but don’t have to live on the same web server, and there are several reasons you might not want them to including:

• Risk Mitigation: more specifically, if your website goes down for some reason your e-mail keeps running so your business can keep communicating. If they live on the same server and one goes down, the other will too.
• Using Google Apps, you get to use their storage, back up, … and don’t have to do it on your own.
• Your email is accessible anywhere you go as long as you can get to an Internet connected computer (and now with Google, even if you’re off line, more on that later).

The single biggest reason that most people tell me they keep using a desktop client for email (like Microsoft Outlook) is simply because that is what they are used to using. I understand the resistance to change but once you get over the psychological burden there is little reason to keep using those apps.

Now, the arguments many people give for not using web-mail and specifically Google Apps:

• I’m worried about reliability. – A fair concern but remember, you’re actually creating a situation where you are less likely to have email and your site be down at the same time. Big companies like Google do have their occasional outages but no more so (in my experience) than any other platform including self-hosted. They have massive data centers and a lot vested in keeping it up an running.
• Google Apps/Gmail doesn’t use folders for my email and I don’t like labels. – This is one of the more common arguments I hear but consider this., if you have a “folder system” for archiving email and an email could easily fall into any number of folders (it’s a contact, but also related to a project but also has travel info in it and is for a certain company) you can only put it in one folder, and then if you need it later you have to remember where you put it. With the volume of email many of us deal with remembering what folder we put every email in is next to impossible. However, you can assign as many labels as you want to an email so it can be cross referenced and you can find it no matter what label you go to. It should also go without saying that Google’s search in your email trumps anything else on the market by a long shot, even if you don’t use labels at all. But if you do, you can simply add label:labelname to the search bar, then your search term or click on the label and add your search term and you’ll get to it pretty quickly. I’m sure I have saved countless hours over the several years I’ve been using Google for email because if their superior search. Labels and search are the two biggest argument for Google Apps in my opinion.
• Desktop clients are faster to use. - Not really. With Google apps you can active keystrokes and use them very efficiently as well as run Google gears to speed up the interface. Between those two things using Google Apps is typically much faster to use. If you have keystrokes enabled, for example, just press the letter “c” to compose a new email. No need to click anything.
• I like to have my mail local so I can access it offline. – Google Apps gives you the ability to also create a local archive of your email so you can access it offline and still use the Google Apps interface when not connected. With Google Gears, you can even compose, save drafts, … offline and send when you are connected.
• I need Email/Calendar integration. – Google Mail, Google Calendar… nuff said. And Google Calendar sharing is MUCH easier than it ever was on Outlook but Calendar is another discussion.
• I don’t like Ad’s next to my email. - Understood but to be honest, I don’t really even notice them and it’s a very small price to pay for “free”.
• Spam. - Google’s filtering is best in the business. They rarely slip through.
• I need to manage multiple email addresses. – Not a problem in Google Apps. You can easily send from any account you have control of from a single Google Mail interface. I have about 8 email addresses I manage but I wouldn’t know it because it all goes into and out of one account. You can also set it to automatically send from the address it was received at.

I’ll ad a bonus reason to to it off; When you switch computers, you don’t have to figure out all that backup file, move it over, restore… non-sense. Just fire up a browser and you’re rocking and rolling again. If you use multiple computers, then this alone makes it worthwhile.

There is one downside, if you need help and use the free version, help is whatever you can find online (google.com and otherwise). No phone or email support from Google. But then you probably don’t have that with Outlook (or name your client) either so you really aren’t loosing anything in the process. And in all of my experience you’re less likely to need it.

So there you go, 9 good reasons to move and make your life a lot easier. Have you had a different experience or opinion on the matter? Let us know, some people prefer different Apps but IMHO (and I’ve been a heavy user for 5 years now), Google Apps are tough to beat.