- No reliable offline usability. As pointed out before, POP and IMAP have some severe issues. I don’t know, if it’s possible to sync google docs or spreadsheets to offline storage, but the basic concept of it makes me assume, it’s a tedious and error prone process. I haven’t found a reliable way to do a two-way sync with google calendar with any client. gmail was painfully slow and for some days even unusable in the last two weeks here, since i only use it casually, i haven’t investigated, why.

- gmail doesn’t support contacts sharing nor synchronizing. You can’t have an always up to date company wide adress book nor can you keep your offline contacs db in sync conveniently.

- google calendar’s multiuser feature lack a couple of features or makes it inconvenient to use them, e.g. setting up multiple users or groups with different access levels to different calendars or moving people between these groups.

Some of these points only apply to larger companies but i think migrating later on might cause severe pain.

Google’s Apps for Domains rocks! We use just about all of it’s features, and already have about 30 documents and spreadsheets on there.

Earlier on we also used a really neat free program called MoonEdit, which is a collaborative text editor like Google docs, except it really is realtime. We found this great for creating documents live and sharing ideas quickly. I hope Google’s version will be as fast some day

We use Google Analytics for our web stats, it’s superb.

Recently we looked at software like Trac for our bug tracking and project managment and found 2 pretty cool solutions: Collaboa and Retrospectiva. We eventually settled on Retrospectiva because it is so clean and simple.

A website called BrowserShots was really helpful in making sure our site looked consistent on all browsers.

It sure makes me feel great that we’re using good tools and not be lumbered with some classic dinosaur solution.

I’m keen to see what other things people suggest.

Andrew / RenderHeads

Anyway, keep inspiring fools!

Once again, greetings from Argentina!

We’re using an ultra-light weight agile approach (coming up in a future entry), so we’re going light on the tools. On the other hand, we just decided that scattered PmWiki pages weren’t good enough to keep track of bugs/requests on our different tools and the game, so we started looking into alternatives. We had been seriously considering Trac, but Retrospectiva looks quite good. We’ll definitely check those out.

–Noel

But even so, that’s really not an issue for us. We’re not exactly going for secrecy or anything. I’m even toying with the idea of making all (or most) of our source code publically available even during development. The only problem is that we’re using a lot of proprietary APIs/middleware, so separating our code from that would take some effort (and at this point, the #1 priority is getting our game out of the door).

You seem to be quite ok with the fact that all of your documents are hosted at another company. Was it at any time a concern? Maybe that could become a concern for bigger companies.

Rod

Did I just do something hugely wrong, or doesn’t the miserable performance of web-based “applications” bother you?

I guess I should have explained that our use of docs and spreadsheets is pretty minimal. We’re not writing 100+ docs full of pictures and fancy formatting. Instead, we’re writing NDAs, LLC incorporation docs, and developer program applications. All pretty vanilla and just a few pages long. For that, Google Docs is just ideal (although I wish I could work offline–maybe that’s coming up with their new Google Gears?).

1. Gmail POP fails. Period. For those who don’t know, Gmail POP doesn’t work like normal POP servers. You can only download email once, every visit afterwards won’t download the “old” email (email you downloaded already) even if it’s on different computers or locations. They ask you to use the recent command to work around this. While the recent command does work it also FORCES you ALL th email you SENT via SMTP. Also, you cannot download email you CC to yourself. Also, you cannot disable spam filters making POP a chancy system. You can’t tell if that important email you’ve been waiting for has arrived or not because, tada, spam filter might have caught and you won’t *know* until you check via web interface. For small companies, POP is generally the main way they access their email. Web interface is fine but constantly sucking up bandwidth to access your email is not.

2. Gmal IMAP isn’t that great either. Despite the very much heralded IMAP FOR GMAIL IS TEH UBER rationale the internet world seems to have, IMAP for Gmail is suffering from poor implementation. A very short list.

Draft syncing causes multiple messages to be sent to Gmail despite being only 1 email. All mail folder, mess with this and you’re screwed (also cannot unsubscribe). Google is looking into this apparently (no QA Google?).

Outlook/Thunderbird/AppleMail/any email application cannot use message rules or filters if you plan to use labels. Why? Because you will have tons of duplicates as each “label” creates a copy of the email. Meaning 1 email will have at minimum 1 + X Labels (1 being All Mail) copies of itself in your IMAP folder.

Subfolders -> parent folder + subfolder label. The folder problem has already been SOLVED. It’s called Folders4Gmail and can be found in the FireFox Plugin “Better Gmail”. Why Google did not implement this method (in short, it’s a label hierarchy) is beyond me.

3. Little control over your users. Google Apps provides very little control over the users. While Google will most likely implement them in the future, at the moment, there really isn’t much you can do.

4. Very little “corporate” or “business” or “company” abilities. You make a doc in Google Docs. You select share with the entire domain. You tell your co-workers to look at file X in their account. It should be there right? NOPE. Despite that little check mark, you still have to manually share the item before it shows up in the document list. This is just one example of the lack of company wide service you would *expect* to have but don’t. No forced Google Calendar sharing (making everyone see a corporate calendar).

5. Bugs bugs bugs bugs. Deleting a user account is a hazard. Sometimes it works right, other times it will bug doing a partial deletion forcing you to contact Google to finish it (otherwise it will still “exist” but you can’t login or do anything to it).

Google Apps is a wonderful service but it deserves the Beta tag more than Gmail does.

Still, all in all, it’s perfect for us, but I do agree about the beta tag. If Google keeps plugging at it, it’ll be a much more real contender for larger companies in about a year.