Calendar, Contacts and Mail form a key part of your personal infrastructure. Google Apps provides the simplest implementation of this and they have enabled full push support – meaning that any changes you make anywhere are reflected everywhere else in realtime.
What does this mean? If you make a calendar entry on your phone it gets updated on your laptop calendar instantly. If you edit a friend’s mobile phone number using the webmail interface while you are looking at that same entry on your phone’s address book, it will change right in front of you.
Realtime means there are on longer any versioning issues. It means multiple people can work together on the same thing at the same time. It means there is no more double-handling of information trying to shuffle it between devices. All of this is a very good thing!
Another great feature is meeting requests. If you have worked in a large corporate environment you will know how useful this is through Exchange server – and now any business or individual can use Google Apps to access those same benefits for free. As long as your friends use the same system you can easily invite them to events and stay on the same page if you ever need to change the date or venue.
The more we can rely on the cloud the simpler our end devices can be.
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