Moving from MS Office/Exchange to Google Apps made Easy

My name is Jeff and I live in Ottawa. I'm creating this blog to share my experiences creating a new business and using cloud based free services for all of my IT needs. IT is now a commodity and any SME can quickly and inexpensively set up their basic services on free cloud based apps.

For years I have been a closet techie and have provided most of my own IT support even when I was running companies that had IT departments. For most of my career I have been a Microsoft Office/Exchange user for most of my core IT functions.

Last year I started my own business (in fact 2 different businesses) and set them up using Google Apps. In this blog I will share my experiences both good and bad as I have made the switch to cloud based computing for my businesses.

For 15 years I was a Microsoft office user. Last year I was in the Middle East on business and I found that my connection to my ISP POP email was not reliable. I was trying to do business half way around the world and couldn't access my urgent emails. When I returned to Ottawa, I looked at setting up my new business domains on a cloud based service (webmail). I looked at Yahoo, Hotmail and Google. I went with Google because of the ease of setting up my own domains and quickly starting the services I needed like Email, Calendar, Contact Management, Document Storage and mobile integration. Did I mention that I live on my blackberry!

Well that was a year ago and I have not looked back since. I have used Google Doc's but I don't expect to give up MS Office anytime soon.

I will follow up with my random experiences "Going Google" on this blog. I hope you find it useful for your business.