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Contact UsI just wanted to share my Gmail transition experience over the past 24 hours.
I was extremely resistant to switching to Gmail. I’m one of the last in the company to do it. I love folders, I love offline, I love exchange/outlook/entourage (EOE). But as a company, it just made sense to make the switch. From a cost perspective, it’s significantly cheaper. We’re also very much about eating our own dog food, which is cloud computing.
So I made the switch yesterday. I was not thrilled. I asked our IT guy to forward Gmail to EOE, so I could continue to use EOE and my beloved folders as opposed to using online Gmail. It was slow and wasn’t as great as standard EOE and I was definitely frustrated. Online Gmail seemed confusing and cluttered and not that great and my standard folders were available there, but not in an ideal fashion, to the bottom on the left of the screen and requiring too many clicks to access.
I asked the IT guy to sit down with me and try to help me out. 30 minutes later I’m loving this thing. I’m using only online Gmail, in the way it’s supposed to be used. EOE is officially turned off forever.
Here’s what helped me change my thinking:
- You can choose different markings to flag various types of emails. Those are emails that are flagged do show up in a separate folder. This is immensely helpful for me. I had previously thought that there were no folders, so it would just be a mess of an inbox with a ton of emails and lots of flags that would take forever to sort through. So I still get one folder instead of my usual four. Within that folder though, the different flags are easy to manage and to differentiate between.
- You can clean up the screen and remove clutter by clicking on edit labels on the left and by clicking on the Settings and Lab buttons on the upper right. The Settings let you move stuff around. The Lab feature (represented by the little green vial) is sort of like an appexchange where you can choose from a bunch of features.
- By moving away from EOE and having Gmail forwarded there, you can truly leverage the good parts of Gmail, especially the archiving function and the search capability and the ability to see all emails that are replied to in one string (this is very cool).
- He turned on the Offline version for me, so I can use Gmail on a plane or whatever. It looks exactly like standard Gmail, it’s not a separate app, you just happen to be offline.
Anyway, I’m now done with EOE and it feels really good. I’m done with bloated software sitting on my machine (read Microsoft). I’m still getting used to everything, but day two I’m very happy. If you are worried about switching to Gmail, please give it a try first with someone who’s done it, don’t just get frustrated and try to figure it out yourself.
My two cents…
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