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Ask HN: All Startup communication+docs with Google?
Would you rely on Google (gmail/Google docs) for all your internal startup communication and document management? Can I be sure, e.g. to get some quick support when my critical data is not accessible for whatever reason? Or would it be more reasonable to go for a pay solution?
Any experiences? Is the risk affordable?
- quizbiz 17y agoTake advantage while you can, back everything up on a physical drive. Worst comes to worst, migrate from your drive to another service.
- patio11 17y agoGoogle is good at many things. Uptime is one of them. Individualized attention to support requests, not so much. I use Google mail for my business. In ~2 years it has been inaccessible to me twice, both times for less than an hour. I got access back at the same time as the other millions of people who were locked out.
- nr0mx 17y agoDon't both Gmail and Google Docs come with offline support these days ? If it's access to data you're worried about, you could also use other apps to backup this data. e.g Thunderbird for email. I remember a fairly recent Lifehacker article about a python script that downloads all your Google Docs, which might be a decent solution when run with a scheduler.
- intranation 17y agoWe use Google Apps for all of our start-up communication/document infrastructure. It works pretty well, and is obviously compatible with most email clients/calendars people prefer to use on their desktop. One thing to be careful of: Yahoo! Mail has been filing emails sent from our domain (and others I've heard about) directly to the spam folder - and these aren't bulk emails, just person-to-person emails. We had to enter into a lengthy discussion with Yahoo! support about getting our emails marked as ham: and we lost quite a few investment opportunities because of these missing emails.
- mattjung 17y agoI was originally thinking of the free version of Googles web-applications. Switching to Google Apps (the 50$ version) could effectively take away some of my concerns, especially support
- dvv 17y agowe use. it works. forget about critical docs, they should stay local.
- paulsingh 17y agoWe use it as well -- no real issues yet. FWIW, I also use a local IMAP client to keep a backup copy... just in case. Setup Google Apps for your startup and then start working. IMHO, this is the least of your concerns at the moment.
- izak30 17y agoI use google docs for 99% of stuff. Critical docs and spreadsheets though stay local, with OpenOffice, and synced with my partners via dropbox.