{"id":721,"date":"2012-12-13T18:17:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-13T18:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uktech-one.co.uk\/blog\/?p=721"},"modified":"2014-01-14T12:45:25","modified_gmt":"2014-01-14T12:45:25","slug":"journey-to-the-dark-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uktech.co.uk\/blog\/2012\/12\/journey-to-the-dark-side\/","title":{"rendered":"A Journey To The Dark Side"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Move From Microsoft to Google<\/h2>\n

I’ve been more than a decade on the Microsoft platform, both as an end-user and technical support guru. But over the last year, I have been looking at cloud computing in-depth, keeping a weather eye on what is and isn’t good about the services on offer.<\/p>\n

And I have to say I’m impressed!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So much so, that as of yesterday, I have moved my entire operation into the cloud.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This isn’t<\/strong> <\/em>a story about Microsoft vs Google, rather an ongoing post about my experiences \u00a0switching from one camp to the other. I’m not going into the gory\u00a0technical\u00a0details – instead I’ll just explain the overall process.<\/p>\n

I hope you will find this useful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Outlook to Gmail<\/h3>\n

First up, lets leave Outlook and move to Gmail. I was full of trepidation – as this wasn’t the first time I had tried this – but as I was to discover, that was a long time ago and Gmail had moved on.<\/p>\n

Initially, I\u00a0switched\u00a0Outlook ‘off’ by redirecting all email to my Gmail account.<\/p>\n

Then the next step was to set up an IMAP account in Outlook, and connect it to Gmail, which was very straightforward and in no time it was done. I dragged all of my\u00a0Outlook\u00a0emails, a block at a time<\/em>, into the Gmail folders,\u00a0within<\/strong> <\/em>Outlook. This had the desired effect of uploading all my historical email, into Google mail – it was slow, but functional, and very soon the first 1500 emails were all copied over.<\/p>\n

The reason I wanted to move in the first place is really simple. Search!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Outlook has for some time been a fantastic email client, but I have two major issues with the program: first, the search capability invariable lets me down and requires much troubleshooting to fix. Secondly, I use email as a reference tool and this means I don’t delete a lot of emails, I archive them: Outlook has never been good at holding huge volumes of emails. (There is a third\/forth issue too – backing up Outlook can become a chore of you have very large PST files – and these large files can slow down the Outlook client).<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Bad<\/h3>\n

So far, the move to Gmail has been very positive – but lets get the negatives out of the way first:<\/p>\n