mikolas

Working With Google Apps

I recently moved my email to Google Apps. As part of that, I also started to try out Google Docs for both creating and storing documents and I’m kind of starting to understand why Microsoft is so concerned about Google.

The thing is, Google solution basically fulfills the need of smaller or medium sized business. No, the offering does not have all the functionality of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org. However, how many features does one really ever use? With Docs, working with basic documents is pretty straightforward. As a bonus, they are stored externally to the cloud, so there are no backups to make, and 25GB mail storage per account should pretty much be enough even for serious business use. There are also nice features for sharing and collaborating with integrated Google Talk that eases distributed and out-of-office work with Apps.

So far, the only problem for me has been offline usage. While I’m rarely totally offline (3G/EDGE works pretty much anywhere), I’d sometimes like to take the documents with me. Google Gears should fix this problem, but for some reason Gears does not function that well on Mac OS X. I think I’ll need to look deeper into that, but one can always export the documents for offline work and re-import them back. The ease of use compensates for that, as I already have two machines at home (a laptop and a desktop) and since the productivity tools are online, there is no need to sync any files to server storage – you always have up to date documents available in the cloud even when working on any temporary computer. No USB drives, no syncing, no copying – it just works.

I must admit that for a long time, I thought that online office suite would not work well enough for any serious use. Now, I think the online approach is only sensible way. Too bad this has not yet gained too much ground in the enterprise space as online tools could easily replace the basic Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations without the patch nightmares and biannual major version upgrades.

Next up is moving my web hosting to Amazon’s EC2 cloud. I’ll report back on the experiences as soon as I have the time to do it.