Well it’s been a couple months now since I switched entirely over to Google Apps for Domains on my personal domain and almost two months since I migrated my mom’s business domains over.  So far I am quite pleased with everything, I mean it’s not all that different than what I had presented to me through my normal GMail account.  I have found the integration of all the Google Apps exceedingly useful esp with respect to grouping and so on.  For my mom I went a step further and set her up with a premium account, mostly due to the large volume of email that she works with.  Also as part of the premium package comes the support, which is a weight off my shoulders since I used to use one of my private servers for her email and thus had to support everything.  With the premium service she also has full Outlook integration as well as integration with her BlackBerry Tour.  With all her emails, contacts and calendar data shared between the web interface, Outlook and her BlackBerry she finally feels completely mobile which was one of the big deciding factors in moving to a cloud based offering.  In fact this integration has allowed her more mobility and the ability to use a calendar.  This used to prove difficult since she would be forced to manual sync such data across devices and often much of this data was not backed up in any way.  Now she works day to day without worrying about if she’s going to loose contacts or emails since everything is housed offsite in the cloud.  I have often had the what if’s, like questioning how well Google maintains a backup system but for them to want to have such a paid offering as Google Apps for Domains I have to think that they must have a good backup or redundancy plan for stored data.  I also went off my personal experience over the last many years with GMail, in which I have never lost an email or contact with out specifically deleting them.  All in all the service has been wonderful and even though I once more need to go over how everything works in Outlook with her again, I can confidently say I’m pleased with the offering and the quality of service received so far.

Posted in Computer Science
1 Comment Posted by Mike