… bought a new laptop computer.
In recent years, I would have replaced my old one long ago, since it’s been slowly dying for about six months.
But since transitioning my email from Outlook (which lived on my computer) to Google Apps (which lives in “the cloud”), and making sure my files were not just backed up (they always were) but instantly available from any web-connected computer via Dropbox, I’m no longer dependent on a particular machine.
That’s huge.
As someone whose precautionary rule used to be, “Never take your computer out of its bag until all the juice-spilling children have gone to bed,” it’s great to have removed this weak link from the way I work.
Now I can work on any machine, in any location, without missing a beat.
Just a quick pointer, it’s not so much Google Apps but rather any hosted email service that uses Exchange, IMAP or any other technology that stores the email on the server (other than POP3) and not on your hard drive.
For people like myself that live in Outlook, a Hosted Exchange service like Microsoft’s Office 365 is really the way to go. If my computer dies, all I have to do is get another computer, install Outlook and configure it to access my Office 365 account. Nothing lost.
That’s helpful, Andrew. How does that work if you’re on somebody else’s machine? For example, I regularly use my wife’s computer to log into my google apps account from home (when I don’t feel like taking my computer out of the bag) and it’s an identical experience. Does the hosted Outlook work the same way?