I’ve been a long time fan of GMail, and I have tried a bunch of the other ‘major players’ in the email game over the years: Netscape, Yahoo, .Mac, Hotmail and every silly @provider.com webmail account that they give you with your inet subscription. Those last have all been universally hideous pits where nothing but spam goes to die, BTW. GMail in general kicks them all. Put it together with Firefox and some of the excellent available extensions and you see where web apps can really shine. Enough touchy feely stuff, what I needed to know this week was how Google Apps could replace some of the key features I depended on from Exchange, and here’s what I came up with.

Feature Comparison

OK, so I didn’t make a huge secret out of it with the blog title where I stand on this faceoff, but having managed to achieve in a few hours what it took me days and lots of Googling(irony intended) to do with Entourage is pretty compelling. I was able to transfer content, establish essentially the same organizational structure, and replace each and every Entourage/Exchange feature I care about with less than two hours of fiddling. Google Labs, Firefox extensions and just the general “hugeness” of the Google community promise me far better access to updates and enhancements than I could ever hope to get (at least for free) from the Microsoft alternative.

I will not say for one minute that Entourage and Exchange did not work for me. They did what they were meant to do, and in a lot of cases(especially on the iPhone) they did it very well. But even in just a pure browser environment, where a lot of the UI “bling” still doesn’t keep pace with a competing desktop application, the general functionality and usability of Google Apps just plain outshines Entourage – and a lot of other email clients as well. Exchange server VS Google for mail – well the one is only as good as the machine you host it on, and is subject to any availability problems that machine might have. Google is pretty much good everywhere, anytime.

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In particular, when I bought a new Macbook Pro not so long ago, the sync allowed me to turn on the laptop, plug in an ethernet cable and enter my MobileMe identity – and that was it. When the sync was done, I immediately had access to my wireless network at home (KeyChain passwords sync’d seamlessly) – no trying to find, copy down and manually transfer my encryption key! That in particular is handy since I have over a dozen wireless network configurations stored.

Another nice to have, since my employer uses an Outlook system for email, was the Entourage sync. Or at least it would be if the damn thing didn’t keep duplicating all of my calendar entries and contacts! When I noticed it the first time I said to myself : “not perfect, but I can live with it for the convenience it provides”. By the time I started getting calendar events showing up on my iPhone for the fourth time, I said enough was enough and went Googling.

Starting with this article on the Entourage support page, I ended up reading this over on MacWorld, which brought me to the iCal Dupe Deleter. That took care of the iCal problem in under 20 minutes with less than 10 button clicks. Not bad – tnx to the creator of that software John Maisey, it worked fast, correctly and exactly as advertised.

I haven’t yet done the same for the iPhone, but it looks like iTunes supports a sync option to just replace the info on the phone and start anew, so I anticipate no problems.

Seeing as how it appears that neither Microsoft or Apple have anything planned to address this obvious problem in the software interaction(strange that those two don’t see eye to eye), it’s fantastic that the community out there in intarweb land is so great at sharing ways to address it. So let Mac and Windows fight over my stuff, I still win. Nyah nyah!

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