In the last week I made two big moves in my personal computing universe. The moves all concern Google. One will shock readers of my blog and the other one probably will not.
For the last year I have used a Microsoft Exchange Server on my web hosting provider as my email back end. This past week I moved my email back end from an exchange server to a Google Gmail back end. The big question is why would I do this? Their are several reasons I moved my email. They include cost, cloud integration, security and consolidation.
Cost is the easiest one to talk about. I was paying 1and1 $7.00 a month x 2 for two hosted exchange accounts for Kelli and I. That translates into a $14.00 per month, $168 per year. This does not count the conversion from US to Canadian Dollars since I live in Toronto. Gmail is free:)
Cloud Integration makes the perfect sense. I have been moving a lot of things I do to Internet/Cloud based applications over the last while. The Cloud is the future do to portability. I can access my data anywhere via my Iphone, my home pc, my IPhone, my friends pc you name it. I live such a busy lifestyle that portability and data accessibility are is major issues for me. Having my data in the Cloud works well and email is no exception.
Security is a good one. A lot of people will argue that Microsoft Exchange is more secure than Gmail. I should first off indicate that security does not just include login in security but also security from viruses and worms. Microsoft Exchange is prone to Active X based viruses. By not using Exchange/IE I am not at the same risk for email viruses. It should also be noted that Gmail has better junk mail filters than Microsoft Exchange. As a result you are not prone to as much junk mail as you got before.
Consolidation is an easy one to talk about. Google is one of of the King’s on the internet. I already use Google Docs, YouTube, Picasa on line, Google Search, Google Reader and soon to be Google Wave. All these services are integrated and use the same Google Id which makes my life real easy. Since the services are Integrated they work very well together as well.
I had mentioned their as a second thing I did last week. I have now made the latest release of Google Chrome my number 1 Internet browser. All the flash problems have been fixed so it makes life much easier. Google Chrome is now faster for the web services I use. Firefox seems to run slower. Chrome’s seamless integration with Google services make it a even more attractive browser to use.
In the last week the move to Google Gmail and Google Chrome has made my Internet experience a much faster experience.
