Well being the system admin part of my job is to come up with new things that can save the company money using technology.  If i can increase productivity while doing it, that’s all the better.  So I decided to give Google a shot on fixing our little licensing issue.

Google has a semi-new service available to users calld Google Apps, or Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD).  The service includes access to Gmail for your email, Google Sites, Google Docs, Google Contacts and Google Calendar.  All of which are fairly good services. Here’s a quick run down of what each does:

• GMail – Google’s email service.  Works via a website, commonly referred to as web mail.
• Google Sites – Allows users to quickly make websites and publish them on the net.  Lots of options for security, not overly flexible.
• Google Docs – An on-line document editing and storage system.  It’s like having a watered down version of Word, Excel and Power Point on the internet.
• Google Contacts – A simple yet effective contact management system.  It is integrated with Gmail so you can easily have a address book of email addresses.
• Google Calendar – A easy to use task & time management interface.  Schedule events and appointments via the web interface and it will email you reminders of upcoming tasks.

The great thing about the Google Apps service is that your able to use all of these systems with your own domain.  This means that your email address can still be rob@robertrolfe.com instead of rob12424@gmail.com.   This is especially great if you want to use the Google Apps service for your company communications, as having your own domain for email looks much better and more professional.

As I mentioned above the Google Docs system is a little watered down on features.  Due to this we were unable to solely use that part of the system for our tests.  To supplement this problem we decided to use OpenOffice.org as a office suite, which has far more features then Google Docs does at this point.  It is also much more compatible with Microsoft Office which is currently the gold standard.

So I gathered together a group of about 6 users in the office and moved them all over to this new experimental system to see if it could indeed replace the Microsoft software we were using at that time.  Well, It didn’t and in about two weeks time we ended up moving all the users back to the Microsoft based platform except one other user and Myself.

What ended up being the downfall was the Word document’s.  Microsoft Word has many different features in it that OpenOffice.org was unable to work with in a fully compatible manner.  Things like embedded documents inside of other embedded documents in a Word document didn’t work properly.  We also had 1 document that the OpenOffice.org program was completely unable to open at all.

Now this wasn’t completely the fault of the Google platform or the OpenOffice.org software.  Most of the problems that we ran into were extremely stupid things that users who sent us the document did.  Who really embeds a document inside of a document and then embeds that into another document?  Things like that should never be done, but Microsoft Word was still able to open it and operate properly.

It just comes down to the fact that no matter how good you make your software, and OpenOffice.org is good software, it still can’t compensate for stupid users.  The Google aspect of the experiment did however work perfectly.  All of the users were getting used to using Gmail rather then Outlook and there were no real problems with that.  However due to the Office documents not working properly, we still had to move back to Microsoft.

The cost savings to buy Office without Outlook combined with the cost savings of not purchasing new licenses for Exchange were not great enough to justify the cost of paying Google for the Apps server.  Especially not after adding the costs to make the email switch for all the users and teaching them the new interface.

As for me and the other user, we are both happily still using Google in favor of Outlook & Exchange.  We both use OpenOffice.org for managing our documents and have little to no issues.  In fact for me it has actually increased my daily productivity greatly.  We are able to still be using this platform because we are more open minded when it comes to technology then the others in the office.  We also don’t deal with the same level of users on the other end of our communications stream as the rest of the office staff does.

So as long as your open minded you could easily switch your personal or business communications to Google Apps and OpenOffice.org instead of Microsoft Office and Exchange.  You simply need to look at your past communications and see if users who send you documents use any really proprietary features that words provides.  If they simply send you basic work documents with text and some pictures, it will be no big deal.  However don’t expect that things will be exactly the same as the interfaces are different and the platforms react differently, but with a open mind you can easily overcome these things.

I know of a few businesses that currently use OpenOffice/Google as their standard for a business platform.  It seems to work very well for them and is currently working very well for me.  In fact it has been able to free me from Microsoft just slightly which I very much like.  When it comes to technology I very much prefer to keep my options open.

Are you using Google Apps?  How about OpenOffice.org?  How are they working for you?  Drop some comments below and let us know how its working out!

I am by far no Microsoft fan boy.  I have used Windows for many years and understand it very well.  The reason I have used it for so long is simple, the majority of software available today is only made for the Windows platform.  The two major types of software that tend to lock me into windows are business enterprise packages and games.  What can I say.. All the best games are on the windows platform and there’s no way I can give up my gaming.  Back to the point!  In my opinion there have historically only been three decent versions of Windows over the years.  Here’s a look at the previous Microsoft Windows versions for home computing and my opinions on each:

• Windows 3.0 – Not great.  Had to run on top of Dos and was horribly buggy even for the time.
• Windows 3.1 – Good!  Fixed a good deal of bugs that were in Windows 3.0 and was a decent OS for the time.
• Windows 95 – Fail!  Took Microsoft a couple of years to work out the bugs, even then it wasn’t perfect.
• Windows 98 – Good!  A big improvement over Windows 95.  Primarily because they took out the DOS underlay.  Wasn’t perfect but was still good.
• Windows ME – FAIL!  Massive FAIL!
• Windows XP – GREAT!  A huge improvement for windows.  Took about a year to get right but was worth the wait.  Many waited on 98 until this was ready.
• Windows Vista – FAIL!  Vista is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be.. now.  It was when first released but about a year and a half after release Microsoft had it together.  Huge part of the problem was software vendors not preparing for Vista during the beta and RC phases.  Due to this all the blame was put on Microsoft when it certainly was not all their fault.  Should have been more like 50/50 blame.

The state of things today:
As it sits there is only one version of Microsoft Windows officially under support, Windows Vista.  On April 15th, 2009 the support for Windows XP (Still the largest OS share on the market today) was discontinued, leaving with no updates unless they move to Vista.  This was not a good choice for users as many of them did not want to move to Vista because of the horror stories from the early Vista days.  Now Windows 7 is due out in October and everyone wants to know if that is going to be the solution Microsoft promises it will be.

Windows 7:
Knowing that this question was going to come up, a few months ago I downloaded and installed the RC version of Windows 7.  My initial thoughts were that it was simply Vista with a new name.  This turned out not to be true.  As I continued to use the Windows 7 platform I found the system to be much more to my liking then Vista with all the latest patches.  Here are some of the reasons why:

• User Account Control – After installing Vista the first thing I ever did was disable UAC.  That annoying prompt asking if I was sure I wanted to do something was far too aggressive for me.  Every time you changed a setting or installed some software, there it was.  In Windows 7 I never actually turned off UAC.  Microsoft improved the settings for the system and actually made it a useful feature, which is good because many users actually need this.  Now UAC is a great feature to help ensure users are not accidentally changing system settings without being warned of the potential danger first.
• Memory Management – The memory management and requirements on Vista were crap.  To make the system run (at any decent speed) you needed 2GB of ram.  At the time of Vista’s release that was ridiculous when you only needed 1GB on XP.  Even with the 2GB of ram on Vista programs and operations still ran slower then they did on XP due to Vista’s memory management.  Windows 7 no longer has these problems.  I found Windows 7 to be much more responsive and use the memory much better then Vista every did.
• After Install Compatibility – One of the biggest problems with Vista was the compatibility issues with software and programs right after it was released.  Many of these have been fixed in Vista due to patches and the software developers fixing their code on the software.  These kinds of compatibility issues were not present in the RC version of Windows 7.  In fact I only had 1 compatibility issue with Windows 7 and it was not the fault of Windows.  The software is known to have problems in the past and the developer never bothered to fully fix it with Vista.

There are many more things I found favorable about Windows 7 then what I listed above.  The only thing I really didn’t like about Windows 7 was the new task bar management for running programs.  XP had a simple 1 bar entry per program task bar.  Every time you opened a program the other icons on the bar got a little smaller and a new box was created.

Vista changed the task bar by stacking multiple copies of the same software into 1 bar entry.  You clicked on the bar entry and a menu came up where you could choose the instance that you were looking for.  Windows 7 decided to take that a step further and offer you screen shot previews of the windows under the stack.  I am sure many users will like this and find it helpful, I just wasn’t one of them.  From an I.T. admin stand point, this one little change will cause me lots of work because its a interface change and users tend to have problems with change.

Windows 7 Task Bar View

With all of the above being said, I think that Windows 7 is certainly ready to be used.  If the version that Microsoft puts on the cd is the same as the RC that I have been running for the last few months, then there is no reason not to upgrade.  At this point I am planning on loading it on every PC in our office within a couple of months within it’s release.  That alone should tell you my confidence in the Windows 7 platform.

Have you been running the Windows 7 RC?  What are your thoughts on Windows 7 so far?  Leave your comments below!