Working with Chicago-based companies and developing various IT infrastructures has allowed Prometheum to compare and contrast various ways of handling email and data storage. This blog post focuses strictly on emails.
A popular solution for small business owners in Chicago is to use Google Apps as their main email provider. There are great benefits to this—but also a few pesky irritations that you should be aware of.
If you’re not familiar with Google Apps, there really isn’t much to it. Basically, it’s just Gmail repackaged for businesses, allowing emails to have a unique domain name, such as yourcompanydomain.com, instead of a gmail.com domain name.
Using Google Apps for email offers several advantages. I go into detail about them in a different blog post, titled “Benefits to Google Apps,” so for now I’ll just list them out:
Outstanding SPAM filter
Lots of space (25GB to begin)
Low yearly cost
Easy of use with mobile devices
Works with Outlook – even multiple Outlook setups
Almost never down
Web interface is well handled
Now here are the irritations and potential deal breakers:
Limited Outlook Sync. By default, you sync 2GB of information with Outlook. Why is that problematic? Well, most people who’ve been in business for a number of years easily have more than 2GB of emails. It isn’t uncommon to have 10GB of data after just a year or two of emailing. Since only 2GB of data is synced and kept in Outlook locally, it becomes a problem to search for older emails. Those emails are only available in Google Apps online, so you have to leave Outlook in order to search for older emails.
Initial migration of emails. If you start with Google Apps, it provides a tool to upload your previous emails. But since there are several differences with Microsoft Outlook format and Gmail—mainly the folder concept as oppose to the label concept—the sync is confusing and often leaves you with mixed results.
No easy Public folder option. In the Microsoft Exchange environment, you can share contact lists and calendars between Outlook accounts, and there is a convenient method of viewing others emails within your Outlook account. You can also share calendars transparently. Using Google Apps makes these functions much harder.
Google Apps is a very enticing offer for small businesses. But if you are coming from an Outlook environment—especially an Exchange Server/Outlook environment—please keep in mind these drawbacks. You might not be entirely pleased with what you’ve gotten into.