Why Enterprises Are Moving to Google Apps, Gmail

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Google plans significant improvements to Docs suite

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The move to Google Apps is now more or less complete and students and staff have started using Alexandra College Gmail.  Apart from a few teething problems, everything is going well and we are currently in the process of moving admin from MS Exchange/Outlook to Google Calendar.  Google Docs, Sites, Video and Contacts are also available to all students and staff and Gmail Labs should be available soon.

Gmail has added a new feature that allows you to auto-add recipients based on users/groups that you mail most often.  To enable this feature, click on the LABS button (the green icon on the top-right of the screen), enable “select more recipients” and click on Save Changes.  Here are some of the best Gmail Labs features.

Rumour has it that Google may finally release GDrive in May 2009 and that it may combine with Google MyStuff.  Now that cloud computing is becoming ubiquitous (we’re hoping that every Transition Year student will have a me.com account to go with their new Macbooks in September), it would be a perfect time to launch such a product.

With GDrive/MyStuff (as with Apple’s me.com), users would be able to move most or all of their storage requirements off the desktop and into the cloud.  Users do this all the time anyway – email on Gmail, photos on Flick or Picasa, documents on Google docs etc. – but Gdrive/MyStuff (we can assume) would let users do all of this automatically and (probably) in one place.  And as with me.com, chances are there will be a drag and drop option and an auto sync option so that all of your stuff is available from any connected device at any time.

In the meantime, Gspace is a simple plugin for Firefox that lets you use your free 7Gb of Gmail storage for storing other stuff.