The Gaping Hole in the Cloud Computing Market
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:04AM When dealing with startups and growing businesses there is no more popular technology topic than cloud computing. At the forefront of this new world are services like Google Apps, Basecamp, SalesForce and Dropbox. For business owners the idea of zero infrastructure cost, no hardware failures or software updates is very, very, very attractive. I know. As a small business owner I've spent more time in the server room than I should. After a lot of research and four years of hosting our own Exchange Server I switched our email over to Google Apps at the end of last year and we are enjoying several benefits.
- Email search has never been this easy or this fast. Using Microsoft's desktop search in Outlook was a painful, painful process.
- Gmail's threaded conversation view cuts down on inbox clutter.
- Gmail's keyboard shortcuts make processing the inbox much faster when you receive 100-200 emails per day.
- Massive amounts of storage mean we don't worry about bloated backups or full inboxes.
- When out of the office we get the same exact email experience as we do in the office. No VPN's or Outlook Remote Web Workplace to worry about.
- Spam protection that seems to work better than our old add-on service.
- Did I mention it's free? Well sort of. Advertisers are paying for it, but the ads are unobtrusive and if we really get tired of them we can pay to have them removed (and get more storage as well).
There are some drawbacks. Gmail does not integrate with Microsoft Office, Quickbooks and some other programs the way Exchange/Outlook does so emailing attachements requires a couple of more steps at times. And then there is this gaping hole in the Google Apps product suite. THERE ARE NO SHARED CONTACTS. I just cannot get over this. When we are using Google Docs we can opt to share a document with everyone in the domain. We can share calendars with everyone in the domain. We can even create websites that we can share with the domain or with outsiders (Microsoft was on the verge of something great here with Sharepoint but for some reason they thought no one outside of the domain would need access to the site). But we can't share a simple contact list?
This is a huge problem because for our office it is the one feature that keeps us anchored to an Exchange Public Folder. What is even more surprising is that no-one has stepped into this space to fill the void. We could spend a fortune ($65/month/user) for SalesForce or we could pay a fraction of that for Zoho CRM. But these are full blown CRM systems and we don't need that. Further, their email interfaces are clunky at best (SalesForce) and downright destructive at worst (Zoho). Zoho Business could be a competitor to Google Apps except for the lackluster email experience.
Google Apps users have been begging for shared contacts in forums and feature request boards for over two years, and this seems like such a simple thing for Google to implement. Their goal is to index all of the world's information, but they can't let me share our company's contacts with the five other users on our domain? I just don't get it. Someone help me. Why go to the trouble of branding Google Apps as an organizational platform and leave out something as simple as shared contacts?
Reader Comments (6)
I have not used the service offered by www.setupmadeeasy.com They have full shared contact administration service for Googel Apps. You may want to look at them.
I have a question for you. What do you use for task tracking and due date monitoring?
Thanks
Thanks Dwarka. I've checked out setupmadeeasy and haven't complete given up on Salesforce. The folks there have been very responsive and I'm going to give their service a run next month.
For due date tracking we've moved from Sharepoint to a Google Apps spreadsheet. For task tracking we use a time entry database (Billquick) and Sales Orders in Quickbooks.
Joey-
Good insight. I've wondered if I should go ahead and switch to the Google Enterprise version of email hosting for our firm too. I'm holding off for just the reason you mentioned. We rely on the sharing of everything that Exchange offers, but a fix for you is not far away (and when it comes I'll be making the switch).
Where there is a hole in computing experience and service, there will be an innovator to fill that need - no doubt, it's coming. If I hear of something, I'll shoot it to you for your review.
Great blog and site!
Jason M. Blumer, CPA
Blumer & Associates, CPAs, PC
blogging at THRIVEal.com
Thanks, Jason. I think you're right. The market will embrace a simpler solution. I'm surprised it hasn't been developed yet.
Friday our team was recapping the various iterations we've attempted and their various shortcomings. I would be interested to hear your feedback from your firm's experience.
We started with Goldmine. Everything was in one place but reporting was a nightmare and email attachments caused major problems when file sizes (quickbooks files) exceeded 10MB.
We tried Microsoft CRM for a while but the costs of patches, upkeep and hosting it on our servers was phenomenal. And it was slow and buggy. I would talk to these MS Certified Gold Partners running CRM and they would tell me how blazing fast it was and how they had no bugs. After five minutes of conversation I would find out they had 10 times as much invested in hardware and their trained techs were spending hours each week/month maintaining the system. It wasn't for us.
We came back to Exchange/Outlook and managed with three primary shared public folders for email archive, customers and contacts. Searching for an email was a nightmare and users had to remember to drag them to the public folder. Server side rules helped but they were often unreliable. It was slow but it worked. However, constant problems with VPN meant using Remote Web Workplace when out of the office. Compared to gmail RWW feels like the early 1990's.
There are three absolutely killer features of Google Apps that have made the switch from Exchange worth it for us.
1. Lighting fast email searches from anywhere with no need to purge old mail.
2. The ability to create and share calendars with users outside the domain in seconds (very useful for major client projects)
3. The ability to create web sites for client collaboration in minutes.
I know you'll get tremendous value from all of these. Keep me posted on your progress.
Best,
Joey
Joey: 2 years ago I worked for a very big consulting firm in Dallas, Texas and we used " Google apps" for all of our clients functions. This was not the free version, but still very affordable.
I was trying to switch " top producer" to "sales Force", but I think it is just too costly. I have found many free applications left to right online to do just exactly what needed. (i"m happy)
Thanks for the feedback, Erick. Give me some insight on the free apps you're using. Ond of the things I like about Google Apps is the ability to step up to premier and get boat loads more storage for a very nominal investment.