So last September, I wrote this. Summary — there are all sorts of conveniences and features I love about using Gmail for my office mail, but the inconveniences and annoyances were such that I was going to change back to Outlook.
*sigh*
Well, after being talked back into sticking with Gmail by the CIO, I’ve been trying to accentuate the positive here but, honestly, I’m getting fed up with … well, not so much Gmail problems per se (I still love the platform), but bad drug interactions between it and Exchange, in particular (as mentioned in that post):
1. Chronic lack of rich text / HTML formatting between the two. People send me tables they’ve pasted into email in Outlook, and I get deconstructed cells (a single column of numbers and text I have to visually figure out the rows in). Bolding and italics I use vanish. Colors get all mixed up. I pride myself on presentation, and the stuff I send out ends up looking like text-editor crap.
2. Calendar linkages are chronically wonky. Sometimes folks can’t see my calendar. Or they see it, but it’s wrong. Or all grayed-out tentative. Likewise, I can’t reliably see others’ calendars, except when I’m logged in from outside the firewall, in which case I can reliably not see them at all.
One barrier that previously caused me grief — having to fire up IE6 from outside the firewall to get to Outlook Web Access — is now greatly diminished by having IE8 on my machine. (I can access OWA from Chrome or Firefox, but the app is highly dependent on ActiveX or something, so I get a dumbed-down version of it).
One thing that’s been holding me back — figuring out how the change in status of my mobile phone (as my company divests itself of ownership of same) — is still there, but since both the above issues are PC-based mostly, sticking with Gmail and GCal doesn’t make any difference here.
I’ve also heard rumors of another Google pilot within the company, focusing on the Documents suite, but I’ve no idea of the timing of that, and, frankly, even though the above problems haven’t been helped by our having limited in-house resources to address them, they were problems back when Google was actively supporting us, so I don’t expect much in the way of change.
So I’ve started taking steps toward the shift — number one of which was setting up Thunderbird to IMAP my Gmail store so I can archive off needed mail before the getting back into Outlook and having our mail policy destroy my messages. Once I’ve gotten that done, I will let the Messaging guys know that I want to change (like all but a half-dozen of the fellow Pilot members).
I’ll miss some of it terribly — I like the client, I like tagging, I love the searchability — but it just doesn’t work well enough with the rest of my company to keep using. Drats.
Dave, my university is taking everyone to GoogleApps for Education this summer. Undergrads went last year, everyone else is this year. It sounds like from what you say here and in the other post that your company was just using it for email and calendaring, and not docs/chat/other apps. And also that you didn’t take everyone over to it (which I think might have solved a good portion of your problems!).
A few questions, if I may, since we’re facing some of these difficulties pretty soon: Were you not allowed to use Outlook to connect to Gmail to get your mail? It sounds like you were required to use the webapp. Brown is letting us use a client if we want, but think that most users will get the best functionality by going to the webapp.
Our biggest problem is with email quotas – Brown has only 200mb (can you believe it) and with GoogleApps, we’ll be getting 7gb, but that won’t be enough for some people. Hence the reason to keep using Outlook (or MacMail for those of us on Macs) and archiving off to a local store messages to get under quota. My office is (mostly) safe from doing this too much, but other departments have users with 10gb of old emails, and some of them are required to keep them on hand due to old grants/contracts that require it. (or simply faculty won’t delete anything!)
We don’t use the Exchange Calendar in our office, so I’m hoping the move to Google Calendar will be a boon to us (we use an old, outdated, soon-to-be-no-longer-supported-by-the-now-out-of-business-company cross-platform calendaring program and have been trying to find a cross-platform solution that would fit our needs for years). Definitely not a fan of wonkiness tho. Were the problems mainly with people still using Exchange?
1. Yes, this was a pilot to see if Gmail (et al.) could coexist alongside the Microsoft world. And when the pilot was over, most folks moved back over to Outlook (where, of course, the vast majority stayed in the first place, it being just a pilot). So the problem was not so much the Google comm suite, but with how it coexisted with the Outlook infrastructure. (Google was aware of this, but seemed unable to fix most of the problems we came up with.)
2. We didn’t test using Outlook as the front end. Hmmm. Wonder if I should try that, to see if some of the formatting issues can be fixed. (I love the Gmail client.) Hmmmmm ….
3. We aren’t allowed to keep PST files or retain mail beyond 90 days, except for stuff that is specifically for projects and archived explicitly for it.
4. So, yes, the problem was with how Gmail and Outlook/Exchange interacted. Answer, for whatever reason: not very well.
Also, due to our very lean Messaging/Server support structure, it was actually more expensive per mailbox to go with Gmail than with Outlook/Exchange, though I would not expect that to be common.
Hrm. Crap. It occurs to me that I use the search functionality in the Gmail client a few dozen times per day. Given Outlook’s craptastic search — that’s a problem. (I used to get around it with Google Desktop, but that’s still not as good.)