My Take on Google Apps: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Now that we have been using Google Apps for the better part of 3 months, I wanted to give a review of how it has worked for us and whether we really miss Microsoft Outlook. This is also a glimpse into how we work on a daily basis at RIGHTSLEEVE.

I was intrigued about Google Apps ever since I learned about its forthcoming release back in 2006 when I attended the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco. The idea that one could run an entire email service off the web (with our own domain) offered some huge advantages.


It took a few years for us to finally pull the trigger as we were so heavily invested in Microsoft technology. Old habits also die hard.


Now that we have moved over to Google Apps, here's the good, the bad and the ugly:


The Good

- the price is right. Google Apps is free, though you can upgrade to $50/user/year for some additional features.


- avoid paying for the expensive Microsoft Exchange which offers calendar sharing, among other enterprise friendly features.

- shared calendars

- syncing contacts and calendar records with a Blackberry/iPhone is done wirelessly

- no more spam (or at least very little of it)

- our IT administrator's time has been freed up as he no longer manages the myriad problems we had with Outlook (mail server crashing, etc)

- no need to backup our mail server

- more intuitive email filters

- email search capabilities are vastly superior to Outlook

- Google Docs is great for sharing documents and spreadsheets in real time across the organization. We still use our server for the majority of our files (ie artwork), but Google Docs makes it easy to work on projects in real time with other team members - no emailed Word attachments!

- the ability to access our files anywhere on any internet connected computer (this is also how our own CRM and production system works as well).

- email is stored in one place regardless of where the email was sent or received.

- managing "out of office" replies is so much easier

The Bad

- Google's Blackberry App is average at best (I am referring here to the Blackberry BIS service as I believe Google works better with Blackberry BES).

- searching for past emails takes quite a while on the Blackberry (min 20 seconds - a surprise for the company that pioneered the 0.7 second search results)

- when using the Blackberry, it does not access "all contacts" when composing emails (it only accesses your most recent contacts). You can access all contacts but it means digging into a few menus and then waiting minimum 20 seconds for all of the contacts to load).

- on the web, the contacts menu within Gmail takes a while to load and searching for contacts is time consuming (searching for a contact takes approx 4x longer than searching for a past email)

- cannot copy and paste attachments into Gmail like you can with Outlook (if I want to add an attachment I have to upload it to the outgoing message, something I could have just pasted into an Outlook message before).

- when you import your calendar records from Outlook into Google Apps, you lose your recurring events.

The Ugly

- data usage is very high on the Blackberry which means having to upgrade to a more expensive local plan. It gets even worse when you are in a different country as data charges are a usurious $6/MB - I use an average of 45-55MB of data per month. Data usage on the Blackberry before I moved to Google Apps was a tenth of what I use now.

The Bottom Line

Over the past 3 months, Google Apps have been down twice (a much publicized event on Twitter). The sum total of the service outage has been 3-4 hrs, not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. When we were using Outlook and had to manage our own mail server, we spent more time dealing with problems which affected our access to email.

Overall, the switch has been worth it. The ability to collaborate with one another across our organization has been the number one benefit, with the time we have saved on IT hassles being a close second.

Hope this helps. If we've missed anything, be sure to comment accordingly.