Migrating to Google Apps Premier

As anyone involved in web design and/or seo will tell you, we spend a lot of time online, be that on our mobiles, laptops, desktops, whatever. It’s also part of the job requirement that we have access to the latest web enabled technologies for project testing. Because of this (and because we just really, really wanted to), we recently upgraded all our company mobiles to iPhones. They’re great phones; a huge improvement over the Blackberry and Windows smart phones for browsing the web and for our business email needs. Unfortunately, as far as email was concerned, we didn’t really have the back end to support them. Some of us were using pop3 collection, some piggy backing off an exchange server, some forwarding to their Gmail accounts. We’d talked about setting up an Exchange server in-house but kept putting it off knowing how much of a ball ache (and expense) it would be.

Then, earlier this month my primary work computer, a Dell Vostro 1310, succumbed to a known fault with the Nvidia 8400GS graphics chip and died. All my 31,000+ emails were stored on its hard drive. Bugger.

Not surprisingly, this triggered thoughts of the Exchange server again. If I’d been running Outlook and my messages had been stored on the server restoring them wouldn’t be a problem. But I wasn’t. And I really needed those emails. Fortunately, the dead laptop hard drive was fine and restoring my Thunderbird profile was quick and painless. Now we just needed to come up with a more robust solution.

We still weren’t keen on the prospect of setting up, configuring and no doubt screaming at an in-house Exchange server so looked into hosted options. Very, very few support mail boxes the size of ours (min 5GB) and those who do aren’t exactly cheap. Fortunately, and not surprisingly, a Google search turned up a Google Apps ppc ad. We’d looked at Google Apps before and can’t remember why we didn’t set it up then. At £33 per user per year and each user getting 25GB of storage it’s an absolute steal. As a bonus, it syncs with the iPhone and delivers using push. And if you’re not keen on using the Gmail interface you can use pretty much any desktop client you want.

I signed us up for a free trial, set myself up as an admin and activated my email account. I ended up using IMAP to sync my local folders with Gmail. Google supply a free email uploader tool to get your emails synced with their servers but I experienced numerous problems with it. Using IMAP took more setting up but was far more relaible and gives better feedback.

I like Thunderbird. V3 has got some really nice features and looks great too but I’d been considering switching back to Outlook because all my peers and clients use it. Outlook uses a proprietary format which occasionally causes problems with attachments and often does strange things to formatting. The great thing about using a hosted solution means the email client becomes less important. I can use Outlook on one machine and Thunderbird on another. If I wanted to, I could use them both on the same machine; the server would keep them in sync. If I’d wanted to switch from Thunderbird to Outlook previously, I’d have had to use something like IMAPSize to export the individual mails to disk, import them to Outlook Express and then export again for Outlook. Using Google Apps made the whole process easier and, to be honest, if all you wanted to do was export mail from Thunderbird to Outlook you could use Apps to do it and cancel before the end of the 30 day trial. Cheeky, but it would work. Depending on the size of your mail boxes the process might be slow but if you don’t have access to Outlook Express it might be your only option.

So that’s where we are now. We’ve completed the switch to Google Apps and currently use Outlook with the Google Sync plugin. Server, mobile and desktop stay in perfect sync and I sleep better knowing my emails are stored locally and in the cloud. I’m sure the whole sync thing is routine for a lot of people but it’s very cool for a first time user. If I send mail from my iPhone it shows immediately on my desktop. Get a reply and I can read it on the phone or online or in Outlook. Having all your emails available everywhere is incredibly useful.

One thing I still wasn’t sure about before commiting to Google Apps was how I could go about using secondary email addresses. I have a number of addresses I check as often as my primary work account and I wanted to be able to continue using these. Turns out it was pretty straight forward. In the Gmail interface I added the additional addresses I wanted to be able to send from. In Outlook I added send only pop3 accounts corresponding to each address. In other words, I used the Google smtp details but the pop3 info was bogus, I just had to fill it in to setup the account. I then forwarded the external accounts to my Gmail account and, by using the account drop down when composing a mail in Outlook, I can send and receive using all my accounts and they are stored and synced the same as the parent account. The exception is not being able to use different send addresses on the iPhone. Still very neat though.

tl;dr Google Apps was a great decision for us and we’d recommend it!