Thank you Paul Buchheit!

[gibsonf1]

I've now officially switched my architecture firm domain to Google Apps, and they are amazing - especially Gmail. A great added collaboration tool (especially the chat and the collaborative calendars!).

No more MS Exchange! No more Outlook! No more enigmatic msg files! No more fighting with the spam filter! What a great day. Liberation.

[jmpeters]

Thank you Woz and Jobs! Hey everyone, I just found out about these great things called "Personal Computers"! You should check them out, they're really cool!

[sbraford → jmpeters]

lol but you have to admit GMail was pretty freakin incredible when it first came out. (still is, we just take it for granted now =))

[paul]

Thanks Fred, I'm glad that it's working well for you. (though obviously it's mostly due to the hard work of a lot of people who aren't me -- Gmail is a big project and I don't even work there anymore)

[gibsonf1 → paul]

I thought you, as the inventor of the whole idea, deserved some real credit and thanks for getting the system started at Google in the first place. :)

[blored → paul]

Woah, I just had a moment where I realized I was reading something by Paul Buchheit. For what it's worth, thank you, my first gmail invite came from someone who turned out to be my future co-founder. Check out ClutterMe.com if you haven't already.

[nostrademons]

You're just finding this out now? ;-) I've been a loyal GMail user since it came out.

I don't understand some of the Google hate that's been going around tech circles lately. In general, their products are really solid & easy to use. My startup's made extensive use of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I use GoogleMaps for nearly all my directions, and both my primary e-mail accounts are on GMail.

[gibsonf1 → nostrademons]

I guess it takes a pretty big mental leap to go from MS Server with Exchange and spam filtering of an established company's email to gmail. But I wouldn't have done it without the apps domain feature so my email is still frederick@gibson-design.com instead of gmail.com. When I see business email at gmail.com or yahoo.com etc, my first thought is that they don't even have their own domain.

My other excuse is that I'm "old" and it takes me a little longer to hobble reluctantly into extremely cool technology. Or maybe its that I'm so jaded from years of using Outlook/exchange, that the idea that something could be so fundamentally better hadn't occurred to me.

In any case, those days are over now :)

[jgamman → gibsonf1]

hi, could you please elaborate on that throwaway line '..takes me a little longer...'. i'm just a user so when i saw gmail and google aps, my first thought was woohoo, i don't need to know how to do the boring back end stuff for email/calendars etc if/when i need to set a system up for myself. it's not a new idea but would you say your experience in the back end stuff blinded you to newer ways of doing things? can't remember who said it, but once you have a solution to a problem, regardless of how tortuous it is, it's always going to win out over the hassle of researching and troubleshooting an alternative, just because you know it's going to take x hours and you can budget the time accurately - especially when you have 10 things to do at once that you aren't sure of the solution to. (btw just to be clear, i'm not hassling you - i just think there's a general principle here that youth has a natural advantage purely through not lugging the baggage of experience along with them. same in the physical sciences where i hang out except we have to wait for generational retirement for the new cycle ;-)

[gibsonf1 → jgamman]

I admit I was joking a bit about the "getting older" and "taking longer" part. Had I played more extensively with gmail earlier, I would have switched right when it was possible to keep your domain, which I think has only been possible for a few months now. So I think a lack of knowledge about gmail played a bigger role than age. To the extent that adapting to new contexts is a reflection of "age", I am a very young person. (After using gmail for 1 day with my startup's streamfocus.com domain, I switched my whole architectural firm over)

As far as the age issue, in the sense that you're talking about, I've met many 20 somethings who acted "older" than me. I have always been a risk taker, an optimist, a person constantly learning to improve, and many people aren't. This is not an age issue, but an outlook on life issue.

[jgamman → gibsonf1]

hi, thanks for the reply - sorry, i interpreted your joking bits to mean that you had been around for a lot longer.

[henning]

I've heard before that what keeps many businesses chained to Windows is not Office but Exchange. If some spiffy online web app changes that, great.

[orionlogic]

There are still countries where internet connection can go offline,from time to time, which makes online web applications risky.

I wonder all these web service providers considers this what i call "the cost of being offline".Let's say, my work 40 hr a week can afford being offline for 3-4 hours for an invoice web application where as in email, this will cost me much more.

[gibsonf1 → orionlogic]

They seem to be working on that problem too with Google Gears where you can work offline. Hopefully the gmail/calendar GG apps will be out soon to solve the problem.

[ivankirigin]

Is there any way to store contacts in gmail -- like cell numbers and snail-mail-addresses? Task management could be better -- as that talk by Merlin Mann mentioned. And is zenter just gone? When will I be able to use the presentation tool they build? There are certainly some missing g.apps (pun intended).

[nostrademons → ivankirigin]

Mouseover the contact in "Quick Contacts", click on "Contact Details", click on "Edit Contact", click on "Add More Contact Info", then you can add phone numbers and addresses for both home and work. It looks like the sections and fields are themselves customizable, too.

[ivankirigin → nostrademons]

awesome. Kind of buried though.

[gibsonf1 → ivankirigin]

Thats a good question. We use streamfocus for action management and contacts, so I haven't actually looked into it. My guess is that they are working on it right now.

[ivankirigin → gibsonf1]

It's all about integration.

[gibsonf1 → ivankirigin]

Exactly - we plan to use the google apps api to do just that. I can't wait :)

[aston]

You should probably be thanking the team within Google who made Google Apps for that stuff.

[gibsonf1 → aston]

Definitely to the team as well. But the biggest deal for me is removing MS Exchange and Outlook from my life - and for that Paul Bucheit gets a lot of credit.

[gaborcselle → aston]

Stephanie Hannon was the PM who dealt with most of the Google Apps stuff in its early days.

[gibsonf1 → gaborcselle]

Thanks Stephanie! :)

[kf]

I had a very poignant moment when I started forwarding my Pitt email to my Gmail address... I realized that I would be using this email program for the rest of my life.

Thanks.