Google Apps

Well I decided to give gmail another go the other day and I think I now get it. The labels thing is a bit bizarre and could do with some improvement, like being able to select more than one at a time to narrow down the email list, but overall it’s a nice idea.

Anyway, after playing with that I decided to take a look at google apps. I thought it cost money but it seems they provided the standard service for free. Why not give it a go? I signed up my casualgenius.com domain to the service which provides me with email handling through gmail. I can add up to 100 users for the domain all of whom would get a gmail account as user@casualgenius.com, a google calendar, a start page of their own, and access to google docs. There are a few other features but I’m not that interested in them just yet.

It was fairly easy to setup, just need to add a few CNAME records to your DNS and change your MX records. Within an hour it was all ready to go. I setup the domain start page (http://start.casualgenius.com) and added a user for myself and Quynh.

Until this point I’d never tried the google docs application. I had a quick look and was very surprised with what I could do with it. So much so I’ve now uploaded all of my teaching class notes into it so I can access them in the office without having to email them or stick them on my usbkey. I especially like the ability to download documents as PDFs, being able to import Open Office format is a bonus too.

So far pretty happy with my decision to try it all out. Quynh is quite interested in the Google Docs app so I’m going to show her how it works this weekend. Not sure I’m ready to move my main email domain across yet but we’ll see how things go.