one of the really nice things about being a Microsoft employee is the really good level of IT infrastructure you come to expect and think of as normal; for example, if you have a “smart phone” (such as a Windows, Nokia, Blackberry or iPhone) you can get “push mail” from the corporate server and instant updates to your appointment calendar, contacts and more. It is very handy when you’re trying to find a meeting place or if someone changes an appointment when you’re enroute, etc. So when I left Microsoft I didn’t have any of those things any more (even though I still seem to have lots of appointments… “networking” is the term I believe :)).
Enter Google. For no out-of-pocket cost you can set up email for your domain as well as shared contacts, calendars, documents and more, stored in the cloud and available anywhere. If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, you also get “push mail” like the big companies have and “push calendar” via CALDAV (the calendar variant of WebDAV) for whichever calendars you choose (you can have many of them with different restrictions… I’ve got personal, family and one for our son’s little league team set up). There’s a bit of initial configuration involved, but once it is set up, it works like a charm. My email domain has been hosted on gmail for a few years now, but I’ve only now started using the calendar and other features. Pretty slick.
Additionally, since I’m dividing my time between Windows and OS X, I can’t use OneNote for my “research notebooks” all the time as I was used to. Google Docs is a decent facsimile and as a bonus lets me collaboratively edit with other people on the same document at the same time. The editing affordances are rudimentary, but it is adequate for my needs.
The price for all this neat stuff is that Google is crawling your content stored on their servers and using it to improve AdSense etc. It’s a little creepy when you’re discussing a mortgage or something in an email and an ad appears on the right-hand side from a mortgage bank. Basically you are trusting Google (in the free case) to protect and not share your data without your consent. For me, for now, I can live with that… but I can understand why some might not trust them. Presumably with the paid hosting plans you can opt out of crawling your data but I’m sticking with the free one.
Of course you can use IMAP or POP to access your mail and short-circuit the ads… that’s what I do, and I use a third-party app to synch my calendar and contacts. But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if they pull the plug on that capability for the free product some time in future.
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