I love Google. I embrace their software with open arms and was very excited to hear about Google Apps. Now I have held off moving to it for a while just because I am a bit lazy and I have the “if it works, don’t fix it” philosophy on anything server related. With the holidays I had a little down time and I wasn’t getting much email so I figured I would give it a shot.

Now if you are setting up a brand new business/group and a brand new domain I think Google Apps is a great solution. I would highly recommend it and I can’t say enough good stuff about the chat client, email software or calendar software. I use all these components separately and will continue to for a long time. I will not being using Google Apps as a whole for my business because it does not seem to be designed for those of us who are already using Google products. Google Apps has tons of import features to like import email from exchange, but there is nothing setup to import from another Gmail. I have gigs of email all tagged and organized that I don’t want to start over. I have a personal calendar of tons of items on it that I don’t want to lose and I have a gtalk with tons of contacts. I am just not ready to start over from scratch.

It would seem to be that Google Apps would be more effective if it built itself on the existing google “framework”. You can sign up for a Google/Gmail account and when you “associate” yourself with a google app you then basically link your personas. So if “Powered By Geek” signup as a google app, I would redirect all my email there and tell it “lwallenstein@poweredbygeek.com = lwallenstein@gmail.com”. I could then use my gmail with all my filters and have perhaps automatic filter with a icon tag (favicon?) that would show me @poweredbygeek.com mail. My calendar would contain my regular calendar and then a set of layers for @poweredbygeek, which I could setup specific sharing rules for that and last but not least my gtalk would allow me to give out lwallenstein@poweredbygeek.com and allow me to set a seperate status for users who add me as my Powered By Geek address and show an icon (again favicon) for those users.

The added benefit here is I don’t have to check 2 places for everything, certain items cross a level of personal and professional (Office Christmas Party) that would need to be on my calendar and I may honestly be associated with more then one group. As a consultant and entrepreneur  I have 4 distinct company groups I belong to… I don’t want four email “pages”, 4 calendar “pages” and I want to use the gtalk client or gadget and not some 3rd party to allow me to monitor 3 IM accounts at once.

Lastly I want to control my “upgrading” on an individual level. I know this may not be a business savy move for Google, but being the technical CEO of my consulting company I want all those added features… larger email storage, SMS updates, etc. Making the “upgrade” of Google Apps be a whole company or nothing scenario (with paying the same amount of a user who has all their data in Gmail, all their calendaring in Google Calendar, etc as a user who just uses their address to forward to another account) just doesn’t make sense.

So that ends my rant… I hope that Google catches on and realizes that things needs to be handled from a indivudual level up and not an organization down.