As I mentioned several posts previous, I’ve moved a large bulk of my online life to Google. One of the reasons I did this was because of Google Apps. I set up a domain for my family in Google Apps as we are always asking for each others calendar information and various shared contact information. Seemed like a problem readily solved by a single, centralized locale to do that. Throw in that everyone can have a personalized family named email address and… sweet! all done.
And actually for those points it has worked as planned. So far I’ve only got a couple guinea pig test users running on the Google App and in the main, things are going well. But there are a couple shortcomings. These shortcomings oddly enough come from the fact that most of the properties we all take for granted as plain ol’ Google and Gmail users (Google for Consumers) aren’t available to Google Apps (Google for Business) users.
So far my test users have been frustrated by trying to tie their new Google Apps accounts into the Maps and Picasa (pictures) features. Unfortunately when they select these options from the “more” link they are unable to login and access these functions with their Google Apps IDs and have had to keep their original Gmail accounts to use these functions.
I’ve done the same thing and this is why I use my Gmail / Google account as my daily working area. All my e-mail funnels to that account and I perform my mapping, picture management, Blogger (family blog), etc. functions from there. I share my calendar using the standard sharing feature in G-Calendar.
So what does the family see as the value of Google Apps going forward? Well, that’s a good question. I think the new Sites feature could be useful. The Pages function could be fun for my nieces and nephews to play with in creating their own web pages and keeping them locked away in a protected viewership area. And of course, it does get family members the ability to use Gmail with an address that’s more friendly than @gmail.com.
Google would be well served in making sure that Google Apps aren’t gimped relative to the rest of Google’s properties. I’m really surprised there’s this gap in functionality as Google Apps is marketed as a business offering and we Google proper users feel quite constrained when thrown into the Google Apps world.
