Making the move to Google Apps

I've always been somewhat wary of the Google empire. I respect them as a search engine and I've been a fan of the iGoogle and Google reader services since they began, but the idea of turning over my mail, my calendar, my life to a company with the motto "Don't be Evil" just seemed a little...troubling.

Yet, after three years running my own mail and calendar servers, I found I no longer had the time to upgrade, fiddle and face the downtime that comes with running my own service and so I started looking for another provider.

There were three key criteria to finding a provider: Email with my own domain, calendaring and iPhone/standards based integration features. In all three Google Apps for Business has checked the boxes, and at a modest £33 for the year I now have email pushing to my iPhone directly, nice.

Moving email was made simple with the migration utility, though I didn't see anything there for any other account features such as calendar -- those I had to migrate manually. I was particularly taken with Gmail and the account management facilities that the Google Apps console gives business users. The calendaring application is well executed online, but lacks something in its iCal integration. All calendars except the primary calendar, appear as delegate calendars rather than additional calendars and while this doesn't impact functionality it does mean that they display less elegantly that they would otherwise.

With mail taken care of elsewhere, I can dedicate my server to the www.napes.co.uk website and other projects. Aces.

Back to the blog

This Article's Tags

View the whole tag cloud