The Wonders of Google Apps

July 26th, 2006

I’ve recently rediscovered the various applications – whether Win32 or Web Based – that Google provide.

I’ve converted my personal email account to GMail to take advatage of the web based and POP3 interface, 2Gb storage, conversation feature – and above all, excellent spam filtering.

I’m also using Google Calendar to manage my work in-out schedule and use it to view my collegues schedules using shared calendars. Once I can get an Outlook-to-Google-Calendar sync going I’ll also be using it for my personal calendar. The requirement to keep Outlook in the loop is due to my mobile phone and PDA both syncronising to the same source.

Google Notebook is keeping track of all sorts of information for me, with it’s Web 2.0 interface and Internet Explorer add-in and the Google Toolbar (along with ‘hosted’ bookmarks) is allowing me to search a wide range of sources and keep track of my favourite sites extremely easily. Scarily easy.

Google Desktop is indexing all my emails and data files and the search interface is very handy. Almost forgot to mention Google Talk for the occasional text chat with various friends and colleagues. An uncluttered and simple interface is quite refreshing.

I suggest if you haven’t made use of these tools, you take a look. Everything is accessed via a single ‘Google account’ which can either be linked to GMail or if you already have an email address, it can use that.

Posted in Computers and Internet, Personal, Web, Web 2.0 6 Comments »

6 Responses to “The Wonders of Google Apps”

  1. 1 Tim Huegdon
    July 27th, 2006 at 9:37 am

    Ah, the wonders of Google.

    Might I suggest you have a look at Google Spreadsheets? (http://spreadsheets.google.com/) I know you sit way over there on the other side of the office, but you’d be interested to know that Web Dev are harnessing the power of Live Edits in our QA spreadsheets even as I type this. It’s a great little app and it even allows you to import/export those dreaded xls files.

    Oh, and if you ever need to do any 3D modelling, Google have just bought SketchUp and claimed it as it’s own… (http://sketchup.google.com/)

  2. 2 Andrew
    July 27th, 2006 at 11:20 am

    Cheers Tim – they look interesting. I forgot to mention my use of Google Sitemaps and Analytics for keeping track of visits to this site.

  3. 3 David Apthorpe
    July 29th, 2006 at 10:48 pm

    I quite agree about Google tools – I just wish there were more interfaces for mobile phones etc. with the google “environment” so that I could just synch my phone / PDA with Google.

    Perhaps thats next in their master plan, if they are just unveiling a world wide WI-FI.

    Must have a play with analytics though…

  4. 4 David Apthorpe
    July 30th, 2006 at 10:33 am

    http://www.grinn.net/blog/dev/2006/04/incorporate-google-calendar-into.html

    Thought you might like that :)

  5. 5 Andrew
    July 31st, 2006 at 11:17 am

    Thanks David – I came across that last week but didn’t have much success getting it going. Ended up being presented with a rather nasty error when subscribing to a calendar. I’ll give it another bash though!

    It would be nice if there was a standard (and I suppose this is what ical is) that would allow sync’ing events and contacts from one location to another with a generic interface. Then “we” could write our own PDA to Google converters!

  6. 6 Chris
    February 26th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    One stop solution for all your Google Calendar sync needs

    http://www.goosync.com

    Its free, try it.

    Chris (GooSync)