Outlook/Exchange vs. GMAIL

Posted by on . 11 comments.

Will Sullivan, myself and others have argued that newsrooms should consider switching to GMAIL because of its interface, search capabilities, advanced filtering and tagging and other features.

Honestly, I am much more productive with my GMAIL and Google Apps e-mail (used with @patthorntonfiles.com addresses) than I am with my work e-mail at Stripes that runs off an Exchange server. And if I was forming a start-up, it would be a no-brainer to go with the cheaper, more Web-friendly e-mail client.

GMAIL just works better. But there are reasons why Outlook/Exchange are so popular in corporate environments.

I’m going to write some posts weighing the pros and cons of a newsroom making a switch from Outlook to GMAIL, but before I do, I wanted to harness the wisdom of my blog readers. What are the advantages of Outlook over GMAIL, especially in a professional environment?

A few that I can think of are:

  • Push e-mail – Exchange has it and it works well. Is there a way to rig this up for GMAIL?
  • I can’t imagine it being easy to transfer years worth of Exchange e-mail to GMAIL. A lot of newsrooms want through headaches when they went from Lotus Notes to Exchange.
  • LDAP support. GMAIL has a really cool contact manager that remembers everyone you have ever contacted, but I’m not sure it supports a company wide contact list. I know GMAIL does support CSV files, and each employee could manually upload a CSV file of contacts, but this seems less elegant than using LDAP.

Please leave information, suggestions and comments in the comments section of this post. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

  • http://patrickbeeson.com Patrick Beeson

    Here’s a big reason not to use Google’s mail solution for business-related e-mail: It’s still in beta.

    Google around, ironic I know, for examples of gmail users losing access or data.

    Until Google offers a solution similar to Microsoft that is a production version, I’d say stick with Exchange however bad it can be.

    Also, not sure how gmail works with BlackBerry. RIM’s server syncs well with Exchange, and this is a big deal for companies that issue the addictive devices to their employees.

  • http://bytewriter.com Emery Jeffreys

    I have yet to lose data with gmail, but that is not to say it won’t happen. For $50 you can upgrade to the business version. It offers phone support, help desk, and backup and recovery service. For a large enterprise, like a newsroom, it would be $50 per person.

    Exchange has crappy search. It’s crappy in a lot of ways, but I shudder to think about using Lotus Notes.

    There is a hidden danger to using Exchange or Gmail for archiving and reporters should be very wary. Once email is more than 90 days old it ceases to be email and is considered a database. In discovery motions or injunctions, databases are treated much differently than email.

    Don’t take my word for it, ask your lawyer. It is different from state to state.

    After that 60-90 day time period it could be dangerous to have email archived anywhere. Some news organizations have email and data retention policies in place just to avoid those scenarios.

    I skirt it by using one gmail address for nothing but listservs and another for real email. I regularly delete email that may come back to haunt me. I have CARR-L posts going back for years even though the listserv has a handy function for searching old posts.

    When reading a lot of threaded email from listservs, gmail can get a little cumbersome.

    I’ve discovered that Thunderbird set up for IMAP works almost as well as exchange. Set it up so that it downloads the header or entire message to your local computer. If it’s on yur computer and Gmail, there are two locations for recovery of data. If it is set up correctly, when you delete a message in Thunderbird in IMAP it gets deleted from Gmail.

    I dragged whole folders out of old Thunderbird folders and it’s now part of my gmail.

    Also I’ve learned to use the GTD plug-in for Firefox as a very effective way of managing tasks and lists in Gmail.

    And if you want to be really cagey, use the Enigma plug ins, GPG and encrypt all that sensitive email. If you don;t have the encryption key, you are not going to be able to read no matter where it is stored. Engima unecrypts on the fly. That means when the email is closed on your IMAP drive or gmail, it’s encrypted.

    Encryption isn;t needed for everything.

    And if you are really paranoid, keep that Thunderbid imap structure in an encrypted partition using TrueCrypt. Without the key for TrueCrypt, snoopers can;t even find the partition.

    If you want more details, let me know.

  • http://www.mindtalent.com Matt Scherer

    Right now, there are 300 million Outlook users. That’s one reason why my client, Head Cram has targeted this user group with a tool that allows them to read at 500 words per minute. In short, the volume of users makes it hard to dismiss.

    Truthfully, I am a gmail user who loves the Google product, but I can’t shake those numbers either.

  • http://www.patthorntonfiles.com pat

    @Patrick,

    For whatever reason Google insists on keeping some of its products in Beta for years (isn’t GMAIL from like 2005?). The weird thing is that large companies do us GMAIL for their e-mail. I wonder if the $50-a-seat version has better back up than the free version? Better reliability? The stories you have heard of people losing their e-mails, were they the free version of the paid version?

    Proctor & Gamble is a member. I doubt they’ve had issues with their mail being lost.

    I wonder about the BlackBerry issue to. I know GMAIL works with a lot of mobile phones, but I know of no way to enable PUSH support. Although, maybe that can be routed through RIM’s servers. RIM,. however, does not have a great record for uptime.

    @Emery,

    Exchange’s search is the No. 1 reason I hate using Outlook. GMAIL has a world-class search engine built in. I always find what I’m looking for. We live in a search world, not a folder-hierarchy world. I can never find what I want when I search through Outlook, and it’s so much easier to set up smart filters in GMAIL.

    Do you have any links to the long-term issue of archiving e-mails for newsrooms? I’d love to explore that more. That could be a serious issue for some employees.

    GMAIL becomes a lot less useful if you can’t archive years worth of e-mails, chats and other information. That’s what I really love about GMAIL. I have e-mails and chats dating back to 2005 that I can easily call up in GMAIL (nothing sensitive though).

    @Matt,

    Bureaucratic inertia is the No. 1 thing stopping companies from trying innovating new products and practices. But what I’m trying to figure out is whether or not GMAIL and Google Apps are good enough to do away with products like Outlook that have hundreds of millions of users?

    Will companies be willing to trust a solution hosted in the cloud? Will IT departments willing allow themselves to be shrunk and to have less control?

  • http://lotustech.blogspot.com Keith Brooks

    Stumbled upon your post and wanted to leave some thoughts.
    Google may very well be the future, however, it is far from ready to tackle the ins/outs of corporations.
    True some have started using it, in very specific rollouts.
    The need to be connected perpetually is one issue, which Google is/has adressed.
    Search has many options, in may ways and is reated to the data structure in place in whatever you are searching. Ltus is a database and searches according to it’s build structure. Exchange uses a mix of various pieces they cobbled togtehr from previous products, going back 10 years so not surprising you are frustrated by it.
    Google views all information as text in a differently formatted solution and thus can search THEIR products beter. Some Google desktop search works well with other products, some don’t. Many Lotus users point to Google desktop search for searching their Lotus mail and applications.

    Trust is a big issue with the Cloud(SLA’s are impossible to provide) and there are other issues. Who owns your data? Is it in the US or in India or China on a hard drive? IN some cases the US government causes more problems because they have less technical knowledge put together than a 1mb usb plug.

    And there are few ways to push gmail for now, but that can change.

  • http://www.greaterfalls.com david

    One possibility: set GMail as your default, but also use the Settings to forward all of your e-mail to your local MS account. Then just use the local MS account as your “archives” (for legal purposes, whatever), but for day-to-day ease & use, just use the GMail wherever you are.

    Downsides to that approach?

  • Dan

    First off, let me state that I am a user of GMail, Google Apps, as well as enterprise Lotus Notes. I have used Microsoft Exchange, and continue to test it as a viable option. I LOVE GMAIL. I use it all the time for personal email and think it’s a really great tool. GMail is a great option, no doubt.

    That said, I have to say that it is by NO MEANS an enterprise ready email option. Yes, you heard me right. It fails in several aspects. Allow me to explain.

    I won’t get into archiving – seems like people have already beaten that to death. But for a large enterprise, let me assure you that an archiving strategy is a must. Google’s is a lacking on that front.
    On a similar note, let me talk about data retention. Can you apply policies to your GMail to force it to keep or destroy certain emails? No. Microsoft has a great deal invested in Information Rights Management and again, for enterprises this is very crucial – from an efficiency and legal standpoint.

    Also, for most big companies, they already have a corporate directory (or multiple directories). From a UX (user experience) perspective, simplified sign-on and single sign-on are very important. So is integration. And this is another area Google fails miserably. It can’t tie into Active Directory, or LDAP, or any other corporate directory. Someone mentioned using CSV files. Well, when you have over 50,000 people, this becomes a huge problem.

    Next, when your organization has VPs, CIOs, CEOs, etc you have administrative assistants that basically do everything for them – including manage their calendars and emails. Using GoogleApps (I’ve tried the paid version) it is not really an option. Yes, you can share calendars and such, but it’s a roundabout, painful way to fix a very simple need. Also, with regards to delegation, with Google you have basic delegation option. Nothing to fine tune how people you’ve delegated to can read, modify, add, reply to emails and calendar entries.

    Let’s talk uptime. With a large enterprise, you need to guarantee 99.99% uptime, with no more than a couple hours of downtime in an instance. Google says is does but as we might all know, they had almost 15 hours of continuous downtime! That is ABSURD! Our email admins would be fired for that kind of downtime. High availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) with Exchange or Notes can guarantee almost 100% uptime (although that’s very hard to achieve).

    Also, for large companies, they usually have rooms and resources that need to be scheduled for meetings. Does Google do that – nope. :( You can schedule meetings, but if you can’t tell which meeting room is available, it becomes a major problem. We have many locations worldwide and this feature is a must!

    I can go on and on about how Gmail / Google Apps won’t work for large enterprises (i have many more reasons), but I have to get home. If anyone has more questions, I would love to have a conversation to discuss this in more detail.

    Cheers.

  • http://www.factpile.com Paul

    While I love Gmail, I’ve found that for at least 10% of the time, it absolutely crushes the browser from a performance standpoint. Even using Google’s Chrome to check the gmail, I will sometimes get the error that the server is too slow, or maybe I should switch to the HTML version.

    Outlook feels ‘heavy’ by comparison from a software perspective. It’s lacking on some features that Gmail has, but I enjoy not seeing text links that are using the content of my email appearing all around it!

    Just my $.02

  • GD

    I heard GMAIL has several paragraphs in their terms and conditions, you know the one that no one reads all you do is check the box!
    Basically those terms and conditions state that anything you send/receive through gmail is basically their property!
    Yup! Had a genius idea? song? play? book? sent it through gmail?
    They can technically, by law, claim it as theirs!
    Scary stuff I know.
    Would be great if we can get a super hot shot lawyer to really look into this!
    I since then have not used gmail for sensitive info or anything I would call proprietary.
    … :)

  • Dirk

    8.1 Intellectual Property Rights. Except as expressly set forth herein, this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other’s content or any of the other’s intellectual property. As between the parties, Customer owns all Intellectual Property Rights in Customer Data, and Google owns all Intellectual Property Rights in the Services.

    This comes from the premier edition terms of service.

    I have been considering Google apps to replace our current Groupwise system and have been interested in some of the comments here. There are a few statements in the feature list that appear to somewhat contradict some of what is said here.

    - Gmail ads can be disabled
    - Email Archiving, powered by Postini
    - Resource scheduling in Google Calendar
    - 99.9% Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk uptime SLA**
    - Single sign-on API (From what I have been told you can tie this to your active directory)
    - Email migration tools and API

    I am not trying to make light of the concerns, they are legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. I just wanted to point out that they say they offer all of these items. As I said I am just starting to look into this so I cannot say to what depths they solve these issues.

  • Corporate gMail User

    Wow. As the manager of a very large Google Apps deployment, I feel the need to warn people that there is a lot of misinformation above.

    Dirks’ data is correct. Sorry I don’t have time to elaborate more on the other myths.