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The Enormous Gmail Productivity Guide

The Free Geek has just published The Enormous Gmail Productivity Guide.

This awesome guide includes all the Gmail-related Firefox add-ins and Greasemonkey scripts. Definitely worth a look.

What a rip! Considering Sharepoint? Be fiscally responsible - investigate Google Apps

So, I am in a meeting today with the IT group from a global, multi-billion dollar company. They are looking to provide collaboration functionality for the organizations virtual teams, which consist of employees, partners and clients in different locations around the world. They need to build documents together, track milestones and do group scheduling.

Since the organization uses MS Exchange and MS Office, the decision is to add Sharepoint to the mix to get this functionality. The Microsoft partner, also present, is thrilled. And so they should be - it’s a veritable windfall! They are not called Gold Partners for nothing.

Here’s what they need to do for the pilot project for just 30 people:

1. Procure a new server.
2. Hook it into the network.
3. Purchase software licenses for the operating system, Sharepoint, etc.
4. Install the operating system.
5. Install Sharepoint.
6. Apply updates/patches.
7. Implement a backup plan.
8. Implement disaster recovery procedures.
9. Produce a plan to show how this will all scale to the rest of the organization.
10. Decide how to organize “sites” - whatever these are, but there was much discussion about the best way to do it. It seemed (not sure here) that based on this discussion, once you went down a path for your “sites”, it wasn’t so easy to make a change.
11. Figure out how to organize and provision licenses for users external to the organization, who would be potentially on the system for just a very short time.
12. Decide which “Web parts” needed to be installed.
13. Test to make sure everything is working correctly.
14. Train the users.
15. Maintain and update. Repeat forever.
16. Wait for new features to be added in a future release (Sharepoint 2010?)

I am sure I am missing a few steps, but you get the general idea.

So this is great for the MS partner, who has just grabbed themselves a nice bit of business - hardware, software, services of all kinds. And this is just for starters. To roll this out to the rest of the organization - holy cow!

But it’s not so great for the organization. Not only is it going to eat up cash, it is going to eat up resources and it is going to significantly increase the amount of time it will take to get this solution in the hands of users.

If they went with Google Apps, they could literally be up and running in an afternoon. And not just a pilot group - the entire organization! For a very, very, small fraction of the cost.

It doesn’t make sense. And it is not fiscally responsible for the organization to go down this path.

But here is the problem - when I quietly suggested that perhaps they consider Google Apps, they looked at me like I was out of my mind. Since they had never heard of Google Apps, it never even came up on their radar.