Comments on: Gmail and small business

By: Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 07:58:54 +0000

OK – and I know I’m being a pedant – but this is what I want

- True two way over the air sync between gcal and win mob without having a third party intermediate the process
- the ability to set up new appointments and invite contacts from gmail
– the ability to email contact natively out of winmob and to chose contacts from my google account without having to manually sync contacts ever

AFAIK this degree of sync is, as yet, unavailable (and I know I could just use Outlook, or get another phone, or do everything through a mobile browser – I’m just saying what my ideal would be)

By: stuartm

stuartm — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 07:33:53 +0000

GooSync works with Windows Mobile devices too – http://www.goosync.com

By: Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 06:59:36 +0000

@nic – but what about if I don’t want outlook installed but want to go from Google to Winmob directly????

By: Nic Wise

Nic Wise — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:06:40 +0000

It does – google does caldav now. Well, it’s early beta, but it’s coming, and O2007 supports caldav.

Personally, I hate outlook, so it’s a moot point.

By: Rich Chetwynd

Rich Chetwynd — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 00:00:09 +0000

I ditched using the exchange/outlook combo in March and haven’t looked back.

Gmail for domains using pop works perfectly with the blackberry. No need for any extra plugins etc.

Download Google Sync (super easy) and you have calendar sync as well.

The biggest part of the switch was moving all of my email history into gmail. It took a few hours for my pst to copy into the gmail pop account I setup in outlook.

By: Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:57:20 +0000

@Nic – sure there are tools to enable google to outlook sync but in an ideal world it wouldn’t take a tool – it’d just work – the way outlook to winmob sync works (and yes I know that uses activesync but it’s pretty seamless)

By: Zoli's Blog

Zoli's Blog — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:41:12 +0000

Life After Outlook: Gmail. But is it Becoming Oopsmail?…

Bernard’s title @ ReadWriteWeb, Breaking Free of Outlook perfectly matches my own sentiment: in fact I called the MS Client Outlook-prison repeatedly.
Unlike Bernard, I escaped from prison in stages:

First Using Gmail to boost non-gmail produc…

By: Microsoft Outlook and the Enterprise : Beyond Search

Microsoft Outlook and the Enterprise : Beyond Search — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:51:49 +0000

[...] Mr. Lunn points out two immediate advantages: almost no spam and he could locate messages. Now Gmail is not flawless. Certain file extensions are not supported. The non hierarchical approach to organizing email takes a bit of adaptation or it did for this addled goose. I know about indexing, but I had to change my behavior in order to make full use of the Google “tags” notion. Note: Diversity blog has some useful comments about Gmail’s disintermediating utility and small business here. [...]

By: stuartm

stuartm — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:04:48 +0000

Just another comment… offline Gmail access has been there since day one – just use a desktop client! Especially if you’re using IMAP – you can use Outlook on your desktop to access your mail and read/unread items are synced between Outlook and the server. And here’s another tip – if you use Outlook to access your Gmail email through IMAP, turn off send/receive in Outlook. Email is pushed down to Outlook from the server and sometimes even appears in Outlook before it shows up in the Gmail interface.

And on the topic of syncing – I use GooSync to sync several Google hosted calendars to my Nokia N95, works superbly.

By: Nic Wise

Nic Wise — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:58:16 +0000

Ben, there are a number of tools around for syncing google to a winmo phone – both cal and contacts, as email is already sorted with IMAP. I almost bought one, but ended up getting an iphone, so it wasn’t needed.

You dont get push tho, which is a pity, ‘cos winmo does push so very very well. I’d settle for the old “send an email to this address when new mail comes in”, which is an SMS address, and the phone then initiates a pull. Was really good on battery life pre-active sync push.

As for the iphone, I hope someone comes out with this soon, esp as google now has caldav on gcal. I have to go gcal -> spanning sync -> ical -> iphone. I can’t just go iphone -> gcal. YET. It’ll come tho.

Other than that, I dont see why ANYONE would use an ISP’s email service – it may go down, be moved, sold, lost etc, where as there are a number of good ones which are ISP independant, and even google for domains, if you want your domain, is free (tho I pay $50/box/year, even tho google havn’t bothered to charge me for my second year, for some reason). And if you use Dreamhost, it’s very simple to setup a new domain, push the mail to google (well, setup MX’s etc), and uplaod a website with pretty much NO complex interaction. All for $6US/month. So easy.