Why You Should Switch to Google - Part One

I’m typical of my generation – I’m in my forties. We were introduced to computing by our companies, and therefore many of us remain wedded to Microsoft products, because of their astonishing penetration into the corporate sector during our learning years. We marveled at Windows 98, we have slavishly used every generation of Outlook, because we learned with an exchange server, we’ve never thought of using anything other than the latest generation of Internet Explorer, and we believe that our data should live on our PC’s so it’s always accessible offline. The latter because we were brought up on chunky IBM laptops with dial up internet connections.

Well, fellow forty somethings, the time has come to break free! Free of Microsoft license fees, and free of the restrictions of working with their products. The world has moved on, and we need to catch up with it. When was the last time you worked offline? No, I can’t remember either! Our future lies in on line working with some amazing products, which will make us more efficient, and which are provided free of charge! In this short series I’m going to introduce you to Google’s products, show you how they can benefit you, and how to get the best out of them. The best thing of all is that they are web based, which means you can access them from your laptop, your desktop, a PC in an internet café or from the old Windows 2000 machine that’s been sitting unused in your holiday home in Tuscany “in case you need to contact the office.”

In this first post, we’re going to talk about Gmail. Google’s mail application is simply brilliant. It allows you to bring all your email accounts into one place, it works seamlessly with mobile phones (including, amazingly, Blackberries) and offers a level of personalization you can’t even dream of with Outlook. Here are some of the features:

• Integrate multiple accounts into one mail system – system will reply from the account received on
• Design and append your own “labels” to emails so you can instantly see what needs what action
• Really easy filter system, with rules you can apply. For example – “All mails from John Smith, move to trash and mark read”
• Multiple inboxes, so you can separate your different accounts if you really need to
• Spam filters that totally work, they are simply amazing!
• Brilliant search facility (well it is Google) means you never lose emails
• Replies are called “Conversations” and stack together, so you can easily follow the history
• Huge storage, so you need never worry about disc space or archiving
• Finally – it’s free!

If you’re still not convinced, go and set up a Gmail account anyway, and just play around with it for a few weeks. I’m pretty sure that in time you’ll move all your accounts to Gmail – that’s exactly what I did.

Want to read part two? Go here!