Outlook Inertia the Main Factor Holding Business From Google Apps

Meshach writes "There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness to give up a tool that's so familiar. Basically, Google is underestimating how attached businesses and their workers are to Office and Outlook in particular. Quoting: 'Google has found out that, yes, many companies are happy to ditch Exchange for Gmail if it means saving money and eliminating the grief of maintaining Exchange in-house. However, and maybe to a degree unexpected by Google, it also discovered that many companies consider it a deal-breaker to lose the functionality that the Outlook-Exchange combo provides, thanks to the deep links that exist between this client-server tandem.'"

Comments

Re:Same old story, same old song and dance...

[capnkr]

{snip}...you don't have to be the best--you just have to first and spread quickly. Then it really doesn't matter much what comes later, you're in the money.

And that bit there pretty much explains the whole Windows hegemony... Within the last 24 hours, on another non-tech forum, there's a guy who's been getting griefed by a WinXP install. After others suggested Linux, he responded with the (all-too common) "...But I can't run my business-related Win apps on it". Of course, and only after I pointed out to him that he could easily do so via virtualization, he comes clean with the real reason - that it is by his choice he continues to use Windows, which in his own words he refers to as 'the devil he knows'. He has been having these issues for over 2 months now, attempting to get this box running - and this from a guy who coded DB apps for Win98. People are very resistant to change. Most of 'em, it seems, they'd rather suffer. :/

Re:You can use outlook

[ajs]

First off, I just want to say that the paranoia issue is moot. Google provides the same sort of assurances that any other outsourced IT organization provides. It's a matter of seeing successful businesses doing this for years that will convince everyone that Google isn't just that ad company they're so familiar with.

You've certainly nailed one of the biggest issues. The ability to control your data, have a deletion policy that is then subpoena-free (including backup destruction), etc. is certainly a deal breaker for most larger companies.

Not optional for any public company in the US, so a non-issue.

There are other issues too though:
Availability / uptime (and yes, I know a poorly run Exchange infrastructure can have a lot of downtime, but a well run one - ours - has certainly outperformed the availability of Google over the last two years)

Sure, you might expose yourself to increased downtime (though it's probably worth noting that you're referring to apps during its beta period). That's a valid down-side. Of course, you get global replication and disaster recovery for free, so you have to think in terms of not having to implement those VERY costly options which aren't optional for most corporations. If downtime were massive, then it still doesn't matter, but Google has had a few bad days during beta, which is vastly superior to my last company and about the same as my current one.

Integration with other MS applications such as SharePoint and Access

Sharepoint (and whatever MS's IM system is, which does quite a lot more than IM, and integrates deeply with SharePoint) is really what this article was getting at. I fully agree that this is a limitation of Google Apps, and while I think it's surmountable for most companies, those that are already serious MS shops will have significant end-user pain moving to something else. Google Docs + Google Talk (both branded and isolated to your company's domain through Apps) make up for some of the functionality, but certainly not all.

Another aspect of the "data control" is user control - some companies don't want their folks logging on to mail from just any old virus-infected, malware laden machine and want them to only connect via known good machines on the corporate network. Gmail makes that control impossible.

That's true ONLY of Google's default Gmail, not the Gmail that's part of Apps. If I recall correctly, you can limit access to your domain by IP. There's a lot of services for the upper-end that I'm not as familiar with because my domain is the freebie service, but I vaguely recall seeing this as a feature (along with S-Ox compliance and various other for-extra-pay features).

There are many others, but that's the flavor. I know that some small companies and even some medium ones will think the above concerns are silly and misplaced, but that's the type of argument you are going to get from the big hitters.

Of course, the real question is: are these significant enough issues that the big boys aren't going to have to deal with competing against leaner organizations that grow up from those smaller companies today. I honestly think that outsourced infrastructure is going to be the way almost all large companies go over the next 20 years. This is why I got out of sysadmin, in part.

Happened here with a different solution

[Hamfist]

We migrated to in-house Zimbra from a simple sendmail server (500 accounts), which has worked exceptionally well. We had quite a bit of pushback from die-hard Outlook people. We adopted a policy that all new hires would get Zimbra and a business case would have to be presented to get Outlook for that user. We also dont support any of the sharing features via Outlook, and all new training material is for Zimbra and not Outlook. We also chose a few high profile individuals and helped them become more efficient with Zimbra to help spead the word. We still have about 50% of the user base on Outlook, POPing off of Zimbra. We expect this number to dwindle as our users decide to start leveraging sharing.

A mixed mode can be supported, and its probably the only way to move away from a deeply entrenched tech like Outlook. Baby steps are required.

Re:You can use outlook

[McFadden]

There are a lot more issues than just getting used to a new set of tools.

I recently set up a new small startup company. We have 4 staff, but 3 of us work a lot from home, coming into the office only once or twice a week. As an experiment I set us all up on Google Apps Premium. The email is great - no complaints. Gmail has always been my webmail of choice, and with POP/IMAP support my 2 Mac guys can use mail.app to their hearts content.

Calendar is so-so. Sharing calendars, particularly more than one seems a bit erratic, but it's just about good enough for us to use (we really need shared calendars do the the business we operate).

Docs is the main weakness. The office suite just doesn't have the feature set of any of the offline suites. Offline support is lacking. It frustrates me that Google make a huge thing of this being a set of "collaboration" tools and yet leave out (or don't implement) a really simple and obvious feature like folder-level sharing. If you want to share a folder containing sub-folders with other people in your group, you have to meticulously go through the directory structure and share all the bloody files in each sub-folder individually. Why the hell can't I just share the top folder and have it apply sharing to the rest of the tree?
What worries me more, is that when you go into the requested features forum, you can see that people have been asking for this for a long time now and it's not happened. Which makes me think that Google simply aren't putting a lot of resource into developing it. I don't like entrusting the future of my business into something that they might just drop like a stone if they feel like it. And without more feedback from the devs, and noticeable improvements over time, it certainly feels like they could.

The docs file manager tool itself seems completely brain-damaged at times. You can drag a file from one folder to another, and it disappears. The folder displays (2 items) but only 1 is visible. Where the fuck did it go, and why should I have to kill my browser window and re-launch to see it? I could go on, but I think a couple of examples are enough to suggest that there are what I would suggest are basic areas of functionality that simply aren't ready for prime-time yet.

Eventually we gave up and went back to an offline office suite. Google Apps is a nice idea, and I'm sure that when it's anywhere near fully functional it'll be a very handy for us. But right now it's not even close.

I apologize for the rather disorganized rant. If I'd had more time I'd have written a more organized critique, but given that I was on my way to bed, I banged out this comment in a quick 5 minute brain splurge.

Condescending comments like this make me laugh

[Sycraft-fu]

So what is a "proper" OS? What does Windows do wrong, that your "proper" OS does right? Provides a standard, enriched experience where more than just a kernel is standardized? Makes the OS easy to use without a command line? Has a working audio layer? Oh wait... those are all good things.

What is it that Windows doesn't do, that keeps it from being "proper"? I'd really like to know since it seems that, well, Windows does pretty much everything. You want to do office productivity stuff? Yep, Windows is good at that. Need a web server? Sure it'll do that. Wanna play games? That's fine too. Doing some media production? No problem.

I get a little tired of this attitude that Windows is such a bad OS and if only people would "see the light" things would be better. Oh really? Then why is it that I can do everything I want with Windows with very little difficulty, which is quite a varied set of things, but when I try to do it on Linux I discover some easy, some very hard, some impossible? From a user standpoint, Windows works well.

The argument of it not being a "proper" OS to me sounds like generally snobbery, the same sort you get from people who think that only their very limited taste in movies are "proper" movies or only their very limited taste in beer is "proper" beer. No, not really. If Linux works well for you that is wonderful, by all means use it, but don't try and push it as the One True Way(tm) unless you've got something more than condescension to back it up with.

To most people, a computer is a tool. They aren't in it for a philosophical or semantic debate, they want it to do whatever various functions they need, and do it with a minimum of fuss on their part.

Re:GMail is a joke compared to Outlook

[That's Unpossible!]

All of the things you're describing as locking these people into Outlook sound like things that could better be handled *outside* of Outlook.

E.g. why is a tech support system being built on top of Outlook? ::shudder::

The only thing stopping our company from moving to Gmail is lack of REAL BlackBerry/iPhone push support. What is taking Google so long to implement ActiveSync? They licensed it from Microsoft, implemented it for Calendar and Contacts. LET'S GO, GOOGLE!