I love being on the bleeding edge of technology. With that in mind, I volunteered to be one of the first NewSpring staffers to make the shift from using Microsoft Outlook to Google solutions. I’ve been using Google for several years to manage home email and calendars. I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook, though, for I think about 15 years to manage work email, calendar, contacts and tasks.

Today’s a brand new day. Here’s what the current set up looks like:

  • We transitioned email to Gmail yesterday.
  • After that switch took place, I imported my Outlook contacts into Gmail.
  • I imported my Outlook calendar into Google Calendar. The huge advantage with that is that I no longer have to manually sync my Outlook Calendar to a Google Calendar for my wife to have access to my schedule. Love that!
  • For task management, I’ve elected to use Remember the Milk. There’s a Firefox plug-in that allows RTM to integrate with Gmail. That makes it easy to convert email messages into new tasks.
  • I’ve also started using Jott to add tasks to RTM when I’m on the road. Jott converts voice into text and automatically adds new tasks to my list. Very slick.
  • The only missing piece to the puzzle is a solution the IT team (that’s Jared) needs to implement to allow me to access my email and calendar from my phone. That’s coming later this week.

And, yes, if you’re keeping track at home, this entire package can be yours for next to free. That’s one of the nice indirect benefits of moving in this direction. That means more dollars for front line ministries in the long run.

Here are some of the other immediate benefits I’ve noticed:

  • Web Outlook has always been a stinky solution in my mind for when I’m away from the office network. Now everything is easily accessible when I’m away from the office through Google’s web-based solutions.
  • Gmail rocks. I love the way it groups messages by conversations. I also like being able to tag conversations by projects.
  • Google Chat is built right in which will be important as my team goes multi-site.
  • We’re going to be able to take advantage of Google Sites to be our internal portal for sharing and exchanging documents and communications across multiple campuses.
  • Google search is far superior to anything Microsoft has ever developed for it’s software solutions. The days of hunting for messages in my "deleted" and "sent" folders is behind me. Yippee!

No transition like this is without pain. I’m sure I’m going to experience something that’s going to be somewhat of a setback. But, honestly, so far the transition has been very positive. I’m loving the new set up.

Now, the only question in my mind is whether or not I should test-drive Google Docs and ditch Microsoft Office. It may be time…