Google, you can have the lot. And I give it willingly.
First you helped me with a simple and fast search engine. This was followed up
by the wonder of Google Earth and then Google Maps. Some other bits and pieces with Feedburner and Webmaster tools, then Google Reader last week took over from Feeddemon. Google Sketchup is in there as well. Now I’m giving to your care 5 years of emails and my calendar data as well. I trust you to do the right thing. For now Flickr can keep my photos.
I still don’t understand why Microsoft has such a thing about Internet Explorer. It’s
the browser—it’s the data. An Google provides a standard, no-frills, simple and
fast way to access it from anywhere.
Four days ago I started a new role with a different employer. By far the biggest hindrance to my productivity this first week has been the inability to access my existing knowledge, be that emails, calendar, contacts, newsfeeds or my PersonalBrain (the latter needing permission to install the software first). I have a Blackberry to carry some of that around but if you’ve ever been the victim of split-syncing (multiple data sources) then you’ll know it’s not so easy to fix.
Truthfully I don’t know what pointed me towards Gmail. I’ve had a Google Account for sometime and it may have simply been a by-product of tidying things up. As I dug deeper and began to bring my existing email into Gmail I found instructions on how to Use Gmail IMAP in Microsoft Outlook 2007. With this I can access all of my mail from anywhere and still retain local copies. That works for me. No longer do I have to say, “I’ll dig that out and send you a copy when I get home/elsewhere”. The Blackberry client is great as well.
Calendar data has been a problem this past week. My new firm uses Outlook appointments extensively as they should. All my existing appointments were in my old system and synced to my Blackberry. Two diaries! Manually copying data from one to another works to a point and that point is when something changes.
Again Google had the answer with Google Calendar. This one however took a
while to work out.
I thought the flow of information was Work PC ←> Google Calendar
Blackberry ←> Home PC. That lead to some nasty sync software (nasty
defined as “I still had to think about it”), including Google’s Blackberry sync which fails horribly because it doesn’t sync all data. All I can say here is read before you decide. There is a risk of deleting calendar data from Outlook. On the other hand Google’s Outlook Calendar sync is fantastic. The order of Work PC ←> Google Calendar ←> Home PC ←> Blackberry works a dream. It transfers all data fast and keeps things in sync.
Google Reader for RSS feeds. Again, every computer has a browser. And so on. Love with a search engine and mapping (one of the world’s great contributions) has led to a long term relationship.