Migration to Google Apps
So those who know me know how I don’t really trust the cloud, and all that jazz. Now don’t get me wrong, I find things in the cloud useful; Dropbox for example is a great tool; I love syncing all my documents across multiple devices, but I’m not sure how much trust I put in it. That is, until recently. You see, everything is moving to the cloud… the cloud.. I remember during a Microsoft Company meeting that was the buzz word of the year. I even remember thinking how we should make it into a drinking game… anyhow I digress.
In the last year or two, I have worked for two incredible companies that operate predominately in the cloud. So today, October 27th, I have moved my entire mail infrastructure into the cloud with the help of Google Apps, and it was a BREEZE. I couldn’t be more excited to destroy this SBS HyperV image and not ever have to worry about email downtime due to power outages, moving, or any number of ridiculous reasons.
The move itself was simple:
- Goto http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
- Configure my domain
- Verify the domains either through simple http get requests, or in my case, I just used DNS entries
- Configure accounts and off you go!
The downside? There are surprisingly few that you can’t work around, but it is a pain nonetheless. The biggest thing for me was outlook integration. That was my biggest draw to Exchange to start with. How that mail is all happy what about contacts and calendar? Well for all the paying users of the service, google has a great little sync app that does everything for you! But for us lowly people, we have to resort to separate tools.
- Calendar – This is actually quite silly cause Google actually provides a tool to do this! Go here to get it!
- Contacts – Google doesn’t provide this for you but there is a simple free tool called GO Contact Sync which works great
Honestly, I hope Google will just allow anyone to use their sync tool since there are already so many alternatives. Either way, everything is now working and happy thanks to Google Apps and a myriad of tools to sync Outlook to contacts and calendar!