Google Gotchas

Let me preface this by saying that our migration to Google Apps is really going quite well and we’re generally happy.

That being said I’ve seen a few gotchas that I’m hoping somebody else has some insight into:

There is apparently a long-standing problem when sending an invitation to an external Notes or Outlook user if they counter propose a different time. Basically you can’t easily see what the new time they’re proposing is or accept the change:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/calendar/YOu01PF2KPw/j2ZnqMYX83UJ

Google’s attitude is that storage is unlimited and virtually free. That may explain the quoting in Google Mail: Every reply or forward quotes the entire thread but collapses it so it’s not on screen. This leads to two problems:

1. Folks who do care about storage and/or bandwidth can get bloated messages because of all the history (including images and attachments), and
2. Folks may be sending on comments from earlier in a conversation that they don’t really mean to share.

Getting Google set as your default for handling mailto links and ics and ical files can be challenging.

In a business implementation there is no way to centrally manage email signatures. There’s an option for a company-wide footer/disclaimer but that doesn’t help manage personalized signature blocks. And you can’t just email the block to each user and have them copy it into their signature in Settings because any graphic needs to be a link set via Settings.

I’m sure we’ll find more of these sort of things as we go forward. Probably a good sign — it means the basic functionality is doing what we need.