It’s been brewing in my head the past few days, and I think we might consider doing it for just our Pure Adapt emails for that reason: we had a few minor server issues this week and it got me thinking about how nice it would be to separate some of our email hosting. I’m going to talk it over with the guys….

You’re right, the phone compatibility is huge for the general entrepreneur. For whatever reason we’ve all kind of avoided it and since none of us anticipate traveling a ton I *think* the culture we want to instill is “if you’re away from work don’t think about work”. Of course, that could always change

Another thing that I forgot to mention in my last email – a good case for Google Apps is separation of powers. By allowing Google to host, that means your email is up if your web server is down. That’s a huge plus for any internet entrepreneur, I believe.

… And phone compatibility, I think, is a big thing. I understand that it doesn’t affect you personally, but I believe you’re starting to reach the minority on that count. In my opinion, phone incompatibility is a big downside to using Thunderbird over Outlook or Google Apps – no official/solid support for mobility.

Since we’re receiving email on a whole bunch of domains (PureAdapt, SportsLizard, DetailedImage, etc) it doesn’t make sense to move every domain we receive email on over to it. I think that would just confuse things. In which case we’d probably only do Pure Adapt, which is probably 35% of my email so I’m not sure how much it helps. I could see it solely as a collaboration tool for the owners, but we don’t do much collaboration or scheduling together…the only collaboration I can think of is the Wiki and our web-based project management system (which could probably be replaced by a shared spreadsheet had this been in place a year ago when I built the system).

And while the backup is nice, we’ve got our server backup, local backups, and now Mozy taking care of that so I’d like to think we’re in pretty good shape.

Plus I don’t think any of the four of us have ever checked our email remotely (without our laptops of course). We’ve got webmail on our server, but I take my laptop everywhere I work…and when I’m not working I want nothing to do with work emails. No one has a smart phone or anything at the moment.

Not saying it’s not a great solution…just that I’m having trouble seeing how it helps us.

Also, in case the point was missed in the shuffle, Google Apps are a newer level of the consumer-level Google interfaces. Google Apps allow you to use your own domain name with the Gmail interface and whatnot. They also, for a very small fee, offer offsite backup solutions & much more. By switching to Google Apps, you take the pressure/expense of email hosting off yourself and hand it over to Google. And in addition, you get the added benefit of the Gmail interface & collaboration tools at your fingertips.

I’d strongly suggest moving over to it, as you can keep your IMAP/POP email exactly the same as before (using Thunderbird, in your case), but with added benefits such as: Gmail for searchability & remote access (for example, this works great when using a smartphone to access the mobile Gmail interface), shared calendar within your domain so you can see your partners’ schedules and provide them with your’s, a centralized place for simple documents (for example, I use a basic shared spreadsheet as a support log, so that any employee can enter in a log of support hours for the day without the need for a bloated PHP/database-centric solution), and much more.

Personally, I’m not in love with Gmail, but if my partners are then they should definitely use it instead of Thunderbird…and with Google Doc’s I’m always conflicted between that and Zoho and other options and I’m kind of waiting for a winner to emerge with the most robust features. It’s all so new, and either way we’ll still prb have OO installed because there are occasions when you don’t have web access and still want to work, and because (at least right now) the feature sets for the web based stuff isn’t up to par with OO.

I also didn’t mention that we’re using Mozy to automatically remotely back up files http://mozy.com/, which works great so you can access your files anywhere.

My hope is that the future of PC’s is more like Zonbu http://www.zonbu.com/home/index.htm where you don’t pay for software at all – you just pay a subscription fee and they update software and backup files for you automatically. I want to get a Zonbu (seems so cool to me), I just don’t know what to use it for at this pt.

So, considering you get a great web-based email interface + 5GB of email storage for free, I’d definitely recommend using Google Apps over Thunderbird. And for the simpler word & spreadsheet processing, Google Docs is part of the Google Apps package as well, which is great because it allows you to easily share & collaborate with other people within your domain.