PhillipDade.com

I found an intriguing read in last months PC Pro magazine entitled, Can You Survive on Online Apps. Stuart Andrews, spent a week working with nothing but online applications and concluded by stating that he would not be happy to ditch his desktop applications in preference for the available online equivalents.

I am a cloud computing convert, choosing to undertake all my work, both business and private, through Google’s products. Many would argue a case against cloud computing, for a number of reasons, including:

• Data storage and security - I’d rather trust my data and information to Google than store it on a personal computer.
• Loss of ADSL connection - In my view, this is no different to an extended power cut.

In my opinion, all these negatives are far outweighed by two major positives - access and the fact they are free. I can put up with the targeted adds appended to Gmail, in fact I don’t even notice their presence any longer. I find that the cost of some software packages far outweighs the benefits they provide and refuse to pay such rediculous fees for these applications.

I thrive on information and enjoy the ability of being able to access it from any web browser, anywhere in the world, including on my mobile phone. There are no file, software or operating system compatibility issues with this. This has recently been enhanced by the addition of IMAP support for Gmail and the updated Gmail Mobile Application . I do feel a few further enhancements need to be made to the mobile application to provide a better experience, but I’m sure this will arrive in due course.

Since opening my Gmail account back in January 2007, I have been flitting between Gmail and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 SP2 with Direct Push. By and large, Google wins. The software is free, unless you choose the Premier Edition of Google Apps, compared to a monthly charge for the priviledges of Exchange. Personally, I feel that Google Products are that much better.

Over the last 10 months, I have developed my own personal nerve centre , making use of Gmail’s excellent search, filtering and tagging capabilities. When in the office I keep a browser tab open for my Gmail and when out of the office I use the Gmail Mobile Application; ensuring that I am never far away from the latest news, information and emails.

My ‘To Do List’ consists of emails sent to myself with a +[phrase] suffix to my email address, i.e. phillip.dade+[phrase]@googlemail.com, I then use Gmail’s filter to label these incoming emails as my ‘To Do List’. I use Gmail for all my email, business email included. I have set up a rule on my works Exchange Server to redirect all my incoming email to my Gmail account. Again, I use the filtering and labeling to mark these up upon arrival and automatically archive them. Gmail’s excellent spam filtering and antivirus packages ensure that I rarely get any spam in my inbox, I receive about 50 spam emails per day, at most, 2% of those are mistakenly listed as not spam. To this day, I have never received a virus in my inbox. In addition to this, I can also chat with my colleagues making use of the built in Chat application contained within Gmail.

The excellent interaction between Gmail and Google Calendar ensures that I receive reminders of forthcoming meetings to my inbox. I reply to my meeting reminders with the items that I am required to action and also attach the agenda and any minutes, once completed the email is then archived for future reference. The only area that I think the interaction is lacking is the ability to email appointments directly to my calendar and them automatically displaying. Again, I’m sure this will arrive in time. As a part of my work requires collaboration between myself and colleagues, I make use of the collaboration features built into Google Calendar and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. I have a shared calendar that lists appointments and meetings and use Docs & Spreadsheets to create an agenda that my colleagues can access and amend as required. I use Google Docs for all my personal work too. I don’t require fancy formatting capabilities or other options. Instead I just want to compose a document or spreadsheet and be done with it and for that, Docs & Spreadsheets prevails. The recent launch of mobile access to these is a major benefit, I’m just glad there is no more emailing files to myself and forgetting which version is the most up to date!

All my RSS feeds are contained within the recently graduated Google Reader. Having all this information within one place is excellent. I can even view it on my mobile phone using it’s built in browser. Instead of having to visit numerous web pages, I have updated information from 100 RSS feeds available in one application at the touch of a button.

The only issue is that these applications are so good, and dare I say fun at allowing you to manage how you are going to manage your work. I find actually getting the work done is not as enjoyable.