The life of an early adopter. . .

I've been experimenting with migrating my srg.com account to the Gmail interface. The benefits were aluring; 10GB of storage; complete cross-platform partiy; mobility; access anywhere; integrated calendaring, IM, and personal web pages. . .just to name a few. However, being on a Gmail island unto itself in the sea of srg.com MSExchange users definitely had it's challenges. I can see the benefit of using Google's Premier Edition across the company, but trying to make it play nicely with our existing MSExchange infrastructure was to challenging given the critical nature electronic messaging plays in our office environment.

The 2 biggest challenges I've found are mobility and calendaring. I have yet to find a way to have my phone receive gmail notifications in real time, and have gmails 'pushed' to my phone rather than having to manually check for gmails. The other main stumbling block was calendaring. There is no direct way to sync my Google calendar with Entourage. What I ended up doing was synching Entourage with iCal, then iCal with gCal. It seems roundabout and difficult, but it actually worked pretty seamlessly, until it stopped working. It was at this point I put my Google Premier Edition experiment on hold.

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