

Ask HN: All Startup communication+docs with Google? - mattjung

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?
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intranation
We 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
I 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

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nr0mx
Don'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.

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patio11
Google 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.

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quizbiz
Take advantage while you can, back everything up on a physical drive. Worst
comes to worst, migrate from your drive to another service.

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paulsingh
We 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.

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dvv
we use. it works. forget about critical docs, they should stay local.

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izak30
I use google docs for 99% of stuff. Critical docs and spreadsheets though stay
local, with OpenOffice, and synced with my partners via dropbox.

