We finally made the complete jump to Google Apps away from Outlook and Exchange. I had decided to move away from Exchange a couple of months back. Google Apps has all the functionality we need on the back-end, and even more (calendering is much better). But we were still using the Outlook client (if you are a premier customer, you can use the built-in connector to sync mail, contacts and calendar but even if not, it's easy to setup using IMAP for mail and gSyncit for contacts and calendar).

On the client side, the last hold up to moving away from Microsoft Outlook was screenshot copies which were so painful using the Gmail interface. That was solved this week with Gmail now allowing copying clipboard content directly in the body of the message when using Chrome. If you combine this new functionality with the slick screen capture extension, you have now a killer product in Gmail, including some features we never thought would appear in a web product (like speed, drag and drop and now image pasting).

There are still a few things that Outlook and Exchange do better. Contact management is one of them, especially the contact sharing. I'm sure that Google is fully aware of the limitations of their current implementation and that they are working on that too. But for us this is not a show stopper since we use Insightly to share contacts (and a lot more). And if you have installed the CloudMagic plugin in your browser, you'll have also lightening fast contact search just a couple of clicks away!

Google Apps has been growing in leaps and bounds, and while it's far from a feature complete replacement for the Microsoft Office powerhouse, it's getting there, one feature at a time. The addition of pivot tables in Google Spreadsheets for example has allowed us to use Excel in less and less instances.

It's easy to see a point where only the specialists will use Microsoft Office, just like only specialists use Adobe Photoshop today. Unless Microsoft moves aggressively on the pricing front, this trend seems inevitable, especially since a lot of the features that Google Apps bring to the table are difficult to replicate in a fat client.