Life In The Cloud With Google Apps

Like many people, I’ve been using various cloud services for a few years. But recently I moved my whole life into the cloud, and I thought it would be worth sharing the experience here.

My previous situation was that my files were spread all over the place – the majority on the hard drive of my PC, many on my laptop, a few on my phone and iPad, and anything I needed to share was split between Google Drive and Dropbox. It was a mess! And as someone who travels a lot, I was often in the situation where I had the wrong piece of equipment for whatever I needed to access.

Added to this, I have been running three main email address for some years, and I was fed up with the complication that was causing in my life. So I took a decision that I’d also combine all of those into one new address as part of the switch to the cloud.

My objective was simple – I wanted all my files to be stored in the cloud, so that whichever piece of equipment I pick up will be able to access them. Coupled with that I wanted a new, single email address, with my old ones forwarding into it.

I flirted briefly with Microsoft Office 365, but I found it too cumbersome – I’ve been a “Google boy” since they started, and it was time to go all-in.

I bought the domain cliffejones.com for our new email addresses – my rationale is that whichever of our businesses I’m communicating from, people are always dealing with me. Although the Mike’s Life brand, the Lanzarote Information brand and the Camel Media Group brand still exist, ultimately our clients are dealing with Mike Cliffe-Jones when they email me, and with Julie Cliffe-Jones when they are working with my wife.

My next step was to set up a Google Apps business account using the domain. This post isn’t about the detail that followed and neither is it a “how to.” But this is what I did next:

• I set up our new email addresses, and redirected the old ones to them
• I gradually uploaded every file from my computers and devices to Google Drive
• I switched my music from iTunes to Google Play Music
• I imported my calendars and contacts to the new apps account
• I moved my Google + account to the new one
• I made my new account an admin on things like Adsense, analytics and You Tube
• I put the drive app on my iPhone and iPad
• I disabled Google Drive sync on my PC – I wanted to get used to always using the cloud versions of files

And that basically was it! Suddenly, I was free of the desktop! And it felt great!

As a next step, I bought a Chromebook. This is a laptop which uses the Chrome operating system. It’s absolutely brilliant – it powers up in under ten seconds, has an incredible screen and it does everything I need to do. For my current needs, it’s streets ahead of my old laptop. I’ve been so impressed with it, I plan to replace my PC with a Chrome box.

Using Google docs for everything has freed me from MS Office, and most of the time I simply “share” docs when people need things. Occasionally, they will reply that they can’t access them, in which case it’s easy to “save as” with a Google doc into a different format.

I’m certainly more efficient that I was previously, so I’m very happy.

Anyone else tried this? Any questions or thoughts?