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So I played with the Google Apps stuff, and it’s pretty cool.  It makes online collaboration for small groups very easy.  Very easy.  A small company with few technical resources can host mail, documents, calendars, and more for nothing.  There are paid options as well, but I didn’t fool with those.

I was hoping to kill a couple birds with this stone (figuratively, of course).  First, I would have liked to have my wife’s email all web based and in a Gmail interface so that I wouldn’t have to deal with her Outlook .pst file.  Second, I was hoping to get a system where her calendar and mine could work together.

The first goal can be done, but I don’t need Google Apps for it.  Gmail will let you send mail from your non-Gmail address, and it will POP your email for you, so you can get all of your mail in their interface.

The second goal won’t work for what I need (as far as I could tell).  I can get a calendar we can share…that’s not the problem.  The problem is that my laptop syncs my Outlook calendar with Verizon, which syncs with my PDA phone.  I can’t go without that.  If there’s a way that I can get a Google Calendar to either replicate to Outlook (preferred) or to get it to sync with Verizon’s wireless sync service, I could possibly make the move.

I could go back and kill bird #1, but my wife uses her calendar too, and she’d be mad if I took it away just so I won’t have to deal with .pst files.

So we didn’t solve any problems, but I learned a little bit from it.  And I’m even more amazed at the awesomeness that is Google.