![]() And yes, the “working together in the same document” is nicer in Google Apps, but we rarely use it. Working together online is a tricky combination of shared Google Drive documents, lots and lots of e-mails and an occasional Google Hangout. Google Apps has no alternative to SharePoint. If you are on a SharePoint project site, you have the context of the information that is shared with you. If you are using a file share, the folder and the subfolder you are in, tell you something about the document. It’s not just the user who shared the individual document. If you don’t start organising that yourself, you will end up with a folder “shared with you” with a couple of hundred documents. You can easily share a single document with other users. Microsoft understood that and with the recent Onedrive offering, they are catching up.Īs long as you are on yourself, it is great. You can easily add files to it via the web (don’t forget to turn of the automatic conversion of files or all your Word files are ending up as Google docs), and I use my local Google Drive folder as “My Documents” so I have an automatic online backup of everything. It is very much like DropBox, it has a good offline sync client for multiple platforms. Google Drive is definitely the best part of Google Apps. But I like to organise my mails in an hierarchy, and that is simply not possible. I see that most of them are using the search function to find the e-mail that they are looking for, and that is indeed a very powerful function. I must say that I see a lot of people who like the web interface. Scheduling meetings is a pain, managing multiple calendars is difficult. If you manage to get it installed and to keep it working, it “kind of” lets you use Outlook with your Google mail. ![]() Oh yes, you can the Google Sync client and use Outlook. I need my “Send to OneNote”, “Reply with meeting”, “Convert to task”, I want my Lync presence indicator for the sender of the e-mail, I want the LinkedIn Social connector to see who is writing me. Try working on the Thalys WiFi with your Gmail. Not just the last 30 days, the entire thing. You can label mails, star mails and create a “folder-like” structure, but if you are really using your inbox as a productivity tool (manage e-mail, manage multiple calendars, work with tasks.), the web interface is not sufficient. And although this might be satisfactory for my private e-mails (10 mails a day), it is failing for me to manage my flow of professional e-mail. ![]() The “preferred way” to work through your e-mail is the web interface, yes, the same one from Gmail. But it is the user experience that is driving me crazy. We had an outage (as far as I noticed) of about 45 minutes in the last two years. You have lots of storage, a good spam filter (Postini), and you can send huge attachments. I have nothing negative to say about the technical part of e-mail. I want to make Google Apps my new best friend. I can honestly say that I approached it with an open mind, determined to make the best of it. But imagine you work for an IT company for 6 years, evangelizing the Microsoft productivity tools (Office, Lync, SharePoint and later Office 365), and then suddenly you find yourself in an environment that is “breathing” Google Apps. This is probably not the first report of the “Battle of the Giants” and it will certainly not be the last. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |