Yesterday Microsoft and Google came to work to present their Cloud solutions to E-mail, Calendar and Collaboration (Live@edu & Google Apps for Education). The relative pros and cons regarding a University moving it’s collaboration tools to the cloud is a debate for another day (despite it being hard to hold back). But one thing the presentations did do is make me re-consider the free google apps service for my personal set-up.

Currently I run a bespoke set-up for me and a small number of friends that provides:

  • e-mail
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Web interface
  • Synchronisationg to mobile devices (syncML)
  • IM (Jabber + transports)

When I first looked at Google Apps a number of years ago, there were a couple of show stoppers that have mostly been resolved:

Mail Aliases

I use a lot of mail aliases. The only way I could previously see to emulate such a feature was to create a new user with the desired name and forward all messages to the appropriate user. This was not a scaleable solution. Now Google Apps has Groups (think mailing lists), a group with just one member is an acceptable way of implementing aliases.

The other end of this requirement is to be able to sent mail from these addresses. Previously when sending a mail using googles SMTP servers with a From header that didn’t match the address on the account, the header was modified to include “On behalf of <foo@gmail.com>”. Now it appears you can explicitly add custom from addresses (although it does require a verification step).

SyncML Support

A number of my devices support contact synchronisation by syncML only. Google did not support this, but it appears now they do. Although this does not work for calendar. How well calendar sync via ical works on different devices is yet to be seen.

What Google does that I don’t / can’t

Now that my gripes with Google Apps are mostly gone. What incentive is there to move?

  • Better Web Interface There is no doubt that the GMail web interface is the bee knees (wasps elbows?). No open source webmail / collaboration suite comes close.

  • More Resilient As fantastic as my service uptime may be, I’m still just one guy hosting these services out of the good of my heart. Google on the other hand is a Giant with datacenters around the world and a lot of income from advertising.

  • More Attributes in the Address Book Currently my address book doesn’t support some funky attributes like photos, although I could make this happen with some effort, google does it already.

  • Mailing Lists Again, mailing lists are not hard to set-up, but I never got around to it. Google Groups provides this already.

What I provide that Google does not

On the flip-side I currently provide some services that Google does not offer.

  • SMTP gateway For hosts, they need to be able to send mails for reporting. Although the hosts can be configured to authenticate against a (google) account, the fact the From address can change makes googles SMTP servers unsuitable.

  • Jabber Transports Currently I make use of a number of Jabber transports (MSN, IRC, etc). GTalk does not provide these transports, but it is still possible to use external transports with GTalk.

  • Confidence that my data isn’t going to disappear Before you butt in, hear me out. Many anti-google folks complain about the lack of control of their data, that Google might share it with other parties. Although this could be true, I believe the chances are so small it almost not worrying about it. If you really have such sensitive data you should be encrypting it individually . My fear is losing my account and not being able to access my data, we have all read the horror stories and they are a real concern. The fact is that Google is providing these services for “free”, if they get a complaint about a user that could cause them trouble (legal, technical, etc) is it cheaper/easier for them to lock that user out than to investigate it. The solution to this on a individual level is to use the ical/imap interfaces to take a daily backup. But this can not be scaled up to be automatic for other users on the same domain.

The end result is that Google offer a very attractive service for free with some features that would be impossible to provide with open-source tools and the resources available to me. For the features they don’t provide, it’s possible for me to provide them in parallel. Maybe it is time for me to become a slave of the Google Monster. For those who know me, you will know how upsetting it is for me to say that.