home business owners

This post is the first in an ongoing series about how web-savvy home office types can free themselves from their businesses one step at a time using Google Apps.

* Using Gmail as the first step towards getting my home office out of my home and accessible anywhere.
* Google Calendar to manage scheduled actions and commitments.
* Staying current with Google Reader
* Research and note-taking with Google Notebook
* Google Docs as THE alternative to Microsoft Office.

So let’s start with Gmail. For years, I held onto my beloved desktop email software: Mail.app on Mac OS X. The usual Apple polish combined with incomparable integration with the computer operating system itself was enough for me to overlook some of the limitations not shared by other programs.

So I kept using Mail.app until I began to be continually frustrated because I couldn’t get to my mail while out of the office. Since my iMac resides comfortably within the confines of my home office, I had to physically be in front of the machine to access my email, and frustration ensued whenever I was out and about.

I did a little dance with Yahoo! Mail several years prior and got burned in a mystical lost-password-lost-email-account situation. It was an endless loop on which I wasted many hours, trying in vain to recover data locked up within Yahoo’s merciless servers.

Enter Gmail.