I’ve been an Outlook user for close to a decade. I like it…without Microsoft and their products, operating systems as we know them today would definitely be different. I’m not one of those guys who likes to sit around and bash Microsoft…each OS has its plusses and minuses, and personal preference leads to strong opinions. I take the middle road…if you like Macs…great. Prefer Windows? Awesome. Think Linux rules the server OS market? Right on.

With all that being said, I have multiple email accounts (4 that I check on a regular basis). I have always used Outlook because it can manage that number of accounts with ease…not to mention that old habits are hard to break.

About a year ago, I took a job with Fonality, Inc. Fonality makes it a policy to NOT use any Microsoft products. Our Intranet, ticketing system, and PBX products are all based on open source software, and we use Gmail for Fonality email. Throughout this past year, I have still used Outlook for my Fonality email since I have it both at home and on my laptop. Since Gmail is IMAP, it syncs pretty easily between my multiple computers. About two weeks ago, we received an email from our CEO, Chris Lyman, touting the benefits of web-based email…here is a quote from that email:

First of all, if you are one of the remaining/dwindling n00bs still using a client for email (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc), all I have to say is: *sigh*. EVERY SINGLE person that has resisted and then finally switched has come back and been like: “OMG it saves me so much time to use web-based email with fast searching that I can use from any browser…OMG what was I thinking…”

And I am like: “You are so 2006, what took you so long to evolve, I have been telling you forever!” Do it; switch to web-based now. It rules. I can search 400,000 emails, from any computer in the world, on 4 different keywords, and get results in < 5 seconds. If I want to find that email from Grant Bowman a few years ago where he called me gorgeous and burly and that's all I remember I type into Gmail search: "grant gorgeous burly" and boom, 2 seconds later I have the email. You just cannot do that with any other client in the world!

Since I was apparently one of the dwindling n00bs mentioned in the above quote, I let out my own *sigh* and reluctantly decided to try to ween myself from my Outlook addiction. After about a week of doing this, and still going to Outlook first out of habit before slapping myself in the head and heading over to Gmail, something very interesting happened. I started to get annoyed with Outlook. It is too slow, and it is not nearly as efficient as web-based Gmail when it comes to locating old emails for reference (something that I do a LOT of). Today, I took the final step, and I’m proud to say that I have completely removed my Fonality Gmail from Outlook (although I still use it for my other 3 email accounts that have less activity). I feel like a new man.

A few tips for Gmail efficiency:

Use the Google Desktop Sidebar – I have dual monitors, so I set up the Google Desktop Sidebar on the right hand side of my right monitor. I have my Fonality Gmail account in there as well as my Google Calendar. It makes it really easy to see new mail and upcoming appointments without having a browser open.

Go through the Gmail Labs add-ons – Gmail Labs (available from the upper right-hand menu in Gmail) are add-ons to your Gmail account that let you do some really fancy tricks to make everything more efficient. My favorites are the signature tweaks (puts your signature right below your reply rather than at the very bottom of the email), vacation time (lets you set the start and end dates for your vacation responder), send and archive (my favorite – this adds a ’send and archive’ button to do two things at once…most of my emails are just answering a question and I’m done with it…so send and archive shaves seconds off of each email I respond to…adds up to minutes worth of savings per week, and hours of savings per year), and finally Default Reply-to-all (this is self explanatory). Another one that I thought was cool, but haven’t enabled just yet is the Attachment Reminder…if you mention ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ in your email, but don’t actually attach a file, this will prompt you when you hit send if you really want to send without an attachment. How many times have you had to send a 2nd ‘Oops! I forgot the attachment’ email?

Use Google Chrome – Google Chrome is all about speed. Chrome 2 (the beta version that just came out yesterday) is supposed to be about 20-30% faster than the original Google Chrome which ALREADY schools both Internet Explorer and FireFox in terms of speed. If you try Google Chrome for a single day, you won’t want to go back to IE or FF. That says a lot. It also says a lot that Microsoft completely ripped off every Google Chrome feature for IE8. But guess what? IE8 is still as slow as a late summer Sunday afternoon.

So let me officially say “OMG it saves me so much time to use web-based email with fast searching that I can use from any browser…OMG what was I thinking…” Technology adoption is all about your own ability to be flexible and roll with changes…this is no exception, so if you are still using Gmail in Outlook, you ARE so 2006.

-Schwood