The Kaptain on … stuff

Recently the company I work for has decided to make the move from an internally hosted Microsoft Exchange solution to a Google Apps hosted answer, and I couldn’t be happier. On a Mac, the Entourage client wasn’t entirely bad. But it did hog memory, disk space and processor and require at least one hard quit each and every day. Other than that it was just fine.

I’ve been a long time fan of GMail, and I have tried a bunch of the other ‘major players’ in the email game over the years: Netscape, Yahoo, .Mac, Hotmail and every silly @provider.com webmail account that they give you with your inet subscription. Those last have all been universally hideous pits where nothing but spam goes to die, BTW. GMail in general kicks them all. Put it together with Firefox and some of the excellent available extensions and you see where web apps can really shine. Enough touchy feely stuff, what I needed to know this week was how Google Apps could replace some of the key features I depended on from Exchange, and here’s what I came up with.

Feature Comparison

OK, so I didn’t make a huge secret out of it with the blog title where I stand on this faceoff, but having managed to achieve in a few hours what it took me days and lots of Googling(irony intended) to do with Entourage is pretty compelling. I was able to transfer content, establish essentially the same organizational structure, and replace each and every Entourage/Exchange feature I care about with less than two hours of fiddling. Google Labs, Firefox extensions and just the general “hugeness” of the Google community promise me far better access to updates and enhancements than I could ever hope to get (at least for free) from the Microsoft alternative.

I will not say for one minute that Entourage and Exchange did not work for me. They did what they were meant to do, and in a lot of cases(especially on the iPhone) they did it very well. But even in just a pure browser environment, where a lot of the UI “bling” still doesn’t keep pace with a competing desktop application, the general functionality and usability of Google Apps just plain outshines Entourage – and a lot of other email clients as well. Exchange server VS Google for mail – well the one is only as good as the machine you host it on, and is subject to any availability problems that machine might have. Google is pretty much good everywhere, anytime.