Online Alternative to Outlook
Saturday, December 17th 2005 | Ismael Ghalimi
If you do not have a Gmail account yet, send me an email and I will gladly provide one. Gmail redefined web-based emailing and single-handedly proved that AJAX works. What makes it infinitely better than any other email client is the fact that it works in a non hierarchical fashion. Instead of organizing emails through folder and having to decide which folder to put emails into, all you have to do is decide to archive or delete. That’s it. And if you feel that there is not much point in even having to make this decision, just click on this big ‘Archive’ button and move to the next email. Then you get Google’s famed search engine to retrieve the email you are looking for in no time. After two months spent using Gmail for all my email (all my email accounts forward to it), I can safely say that it totally redefined my emailing experience.
Of course, Gmail just does email, therefore advanced features of Outlook such as calendaring and task management have to be handled through third-party services. This is where Salesforce.com can save the day. Over the past six months, I have used this service to manage all my appointments, tasks and projects, and all I can say is that it works. Because tasks can be attached to a contact, an account, an opportunity or any other relational object managed by the application, the number of tasks one can handle is an order of magnitude larger than what could be achieved with Outlook’s linear approach. And when Salesforce.com adds recurring events with their Winter ‘06 release, all required features will be there for one to migrate from Outlook without losing much.
Now comes the trick question: “how about working offline?” There are three answers I could think of: first, Gmail added Gmail Mobile yesterday, making it available on cell phones and other mobile devices. Second, one can forward all incoming emails to a BlackBerry device. I do that with my 7290 but might just use Gmail Mobile when I upgrade to the new 8700. Third, because Gmail is an online service, as opposed to a client application, one can get access to email using any connected computer, instead of just the one where Outlook has been installed and properly configured for your email accounts. Of course, you could use the web-based Outlook client that comes with an Exchange server, but anyone who tried to use it with any web browser other than Internet Explorer will tell you that it’s not a good idea, really. And when you think about it, unless you are spending your life in an airplane, there are not many instances in life when one does not have cell phone coverage without any connected computer in sight. And if you find yourself in this situation, I would guess that you did it on purpose, getting yourself to the most remote place you could find for your well-deserved vacations, and the last thing you want is doing email.
At this point, there is only one thing missing: integration of contacts between Gmail and Salesforce.com. Even though you can export contact from Salesforce.com and import them into Gmail (I did that recently for 4,838 of them), automatic synchronization would make it much easier.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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I’ve been ranting about this for ages. In the desktop CRM world, one application I am aware of integrates email and CRM: GoldMien by Frontrange. It’s own email client intelligently links not only outgoing emails to a contacts/accounts history, but also incoming. Complete 360 degree view of emails attached to the CRM contact record. Not sure if or how it makes sense, but to your point, an email client tied to the CRM tool would be a dream. Its being done in traditional software (http://www.frontrange.com). When will a web-CRM offer the same thing?
Brett,
You’re right on target. This is exactly what is needed. Ideally, you should be able to use any web-based email client such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. A lot more work has to be done in this area…
[…] Office 2.0 does not work when you’re offlineAs mentioned before, this one won’t be solved, because it should not. Offline Office 2.0 is an oxymoron, so forget about it, and find ways to remain online most of the time instead. For me, that currently means looking for a good wireless modem card that I could stick into my PowerBook’s PCCARD slot. […]
I love Gmail, but there is one big missing feature you neglected to mention — the ability to send emails via a POP server. So, if like you, one forwards multiple email accounts to a gmail account, and then wants to reply to a received email, the reply will say something like ’sent by Gmail on behalf of’. Yahoo! Mail allows you to specify POP accounts and send from them directly.
Gmail Fan,
You’re right, even though Gmail lets you set the ‘From’ field.
Howdy,
Stumbled upon your podcast with the ZDNet between the lines people.
It’s not that I haven’t been talking about this stuff for years… but it was just so damn refreshing to hear the ideas coming from soneone else for a change. I’m in the “social media” space. A.k.a. video blogging and podcasting. In that realm Web services make even more sense because media is all about sharing experiences.
One of my favorite pet projects is mefeedia.com. We’re talking online media management and content management via bookmarking, favoriting, tagging, sharing, Piping media to whatever device or computer you like, managing subscriptions, queuing media from anywhere on the Web. All this makes infinitely more sense in the new media space, because it’s social. Every action you take, wether favoriting, or subscribing, or queueing a piece of media makes it that much more likely others, especially your friends will find it, or will find what interests them.
What’s interesting about that space is that it really was born online… It’s made the clean bread from the 1.0 world to 2.0… In fact you might say it didn’t exist until now.
In an odd bit of perspective I’ve often pointed to Netflix as the original media 2.0 application. It centralized the intelligence into a central and social experience on the Web. The only difference is now we use RSS 2.0 with enclosures to ship our bits instead of snail mail. Which makes our services infinitely more cost effective.
Anyway, it was great to hear your talk with the ZDNet guys. Very refreshing perspective. I left my comments here because I noticed that in mentioning Salesforce.com you didn’t mention cost. I’m just going to assume it’s expensive as heck. It sure sounds like it.
Lastly… here’s a great pure 2.0 Web service for you. I’ve lately fallen in love with co.mments.com. It’s a comment tracker. It can track responses to your comments, no matter where, indeed anywhere you leave them on the open Web. Because of this you can just respond to me here. I’ll get it, as sure as if you’d sent me an email. It’s completely liberating. I find myself leaving more comments and sending less emails. As you said in the between the lines ZDNet podcast: :what needs to be private?” Certainly not this. In fact it’s very beneficial to have inter-personal conversations that just so happen to be public… It’s in fact one of the founding principles of videoblogging & podcasting.
One last tidbit: GIS (GPS based) services are exploding right now. I’m sure you’ll have noticed by now Flickr has introduced a buggy but promising beta of photo maps. But in my opinion the real innovation is elsewhere, as in collaborative maping and route sharing. If you’re a cyclist, hiker, motorcyclist or just love travel you should check out bikely.com and routeslip.com. Two brand spanking new route sharing sites. Route sharing, collaborative mapping, and geotagging are going to explode the Web back into local meatspace, reviving pride and interest in local geographical community… a.k.a. localism.
Peace,
-Mike
Mike,
Thank you for all these pieces of advice.
co.mments.com is really cool indeed. My friend Assaf built it.
I will need to add support for it on the blog when I find the time for it.
Teste
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