Pondering the shift from GMail back to Outlook

I’ve been involved in a corporate pilot the last few months using GMail and related Google Apps as part of our integrated corporate mail / calendar / app environment. It’s been very interesting, and I’ve been loving using GMail instead of Outlook.

So I think I’m converting back.

First off, the pilot is complete. Interestingly, most of the folks on the pilot, having been given the option, are sticking with GMail, an option the CIO has been interested in allowing. On the other hand, it’s not clear to me that the system is going to be all that well supported — not just GMail itself, but all the connecting bits between company mail / calendaring / contacts. Already we’ve been told that the Blackberry interface will be going away, returning us to Google Sync for Mobiles; I actually prefer that course (since it means using the GMail interface rather than the BB client), but it’s a sign of impending decay of the infrastructure.

Let’s start with why I’ve loved using Google and the advantages of staying on:

1. The GMail client (on the PC) rocks. It’s thin, it’s fast, it’s web-enabled … it does tagging seamlessly, the thread management is wonderful, and the integrated Search on mail is fabulous. 
2. It’s not the Outlook client, which is slow, a memory hog, and takes all sorts of time to shut down cleanly.
3. It’s a single client to use, accessible from everywhere and from any browser (vs. Outlook desktop from my laptop in the office, vs. Outlook Web Access, from IE only, from everywhere else).
4. It’s neat to have my work calendar cleanly integrated with my home Google calendar(s).
5. GMail’s attachment viewer is pretty awesome. 

That’s pretty much it — the first two are the real key here, in that the mail management tools of GMail are so much better than those of Outlook, it’s almost not a contest.

Almost.

Let’s look at why I’m going to be switching back.

1. The GMail client does not support rich text format (RTF) data. At all. Especially when it interacts back and forth with Outlook/Exchange. IBasic formats (bolding, italics) would vanish. But, more importantly, you can’t just cut and paste RT from Word or Excel (or have one of your correspondents) do so with any significant chance that it will be readable when sent. Tables of data copied over into Outlook turn into an unformatted single column of text. Tables I paste in turn into mushed-up paragraphs. It’s been a problem from Day 1 in the project, and has been something I’ve complained about to Google for the entire time. Their excuse — that Exchange and MS apps do all sorts of weird things with RTF text — is plausible, but it’s not an excuse for an ostensibly enterprise-ready system.
2. Our company’s doing more and more with Global Address List (GAL) data in Exchange, only a subset of which gets transmitted over to GMail. Yes, contact names, phone numbers, email addresses, addresses, those are all there. But DL membership (and membership in DLs), and employee hierarchy aren’t supported, and I make use of that all the time (or did).
3. There have always been hiccups, large and small, with Calendar interconnectivity with the Blackberry. This has been true whether using Mobile Sync or the Google BES. There are delays in updates. There have been sync problems. With GBES the action is all one-way, so you can’t respond to appointments or set them yourself. There have been items that never showed up (or that never got deleted when canceled or rescheduled). It’s about 90% there — but having a calendar with 10% inaccurate is … problematic.
4. Google Calendar is functionally equivalent to Outlook Calendar. But the interchange of data with Outlook is sketchy (you can’t see the calendars of those who aren’t on GCal), the free-busy ties have sometimes been messed up, and I don’t think GCal does as good a job of (a) showing “free time” appointments, and (b) allowing color coding of different types of appointments (meetings vs. personal vs. …)

These are pretty much in order of importance. The RTF thing has driven me nuts over and over again. Putting things on as an attachment is clumsy (esp. since Google doesn’t allow opening attachments directly), and it’s impractical to ask all folks who send me stuff to only send attachments anyway. This causes me to gnash my teeth 2-3 times a day.

So I’m probably going to bite the bullet next week and let the pilot team know I want to hop back. I’m sure I’ll regret it. I already know I’ll miss the search capability and …

Okay, our CIO came in and waxed enthusiastic about GMail and Google and its future, etc. Sooooooo … I’ll stick with it. For a while longer.

*sigh*