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Migrating from Entourage to Gmail

Making the switch to Gmail -- on a full-time basis
For quite some time, I had been using Google Apps' hosted e-mail service for negate.net. It's all nice and everything in that I rarely ever have to worry about e-mail servers going down anymore, but as Google rolls out new features like Gmail mobile (for Blackberry) and other services that are integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar, they seem to forget about the Google Apps hosted domains (like negate.net). In their defense, Google Apps is still in beta, so supporting it in everything they launch may not be a top priority, but I was genuinely bummed when my negate.net e-mail did not work on Gmail's mobile client.

Gmail supports multiple e-mail accounts with ease
So, today I setup all of my e-mail accounts (those that are hosted by Google and those that are still hosted by me) to be forwarded to my Gmail account which I had never really used before until today. Gmail supports sending from multiple e-mail addresses and as long as you can forward your e-mail to your single gmail.com address, this is really a dream come true for me.

Goodbye Entourage
I am now going to try completely eliminating the use of Entourage (OS X version of Outlook) for e-mail and for calendar purposes. I still use my Exchange server calendar and BlackBerry for most of my scheduling needs, but with Google Notifier, keeping up-to-date with personal calendar events and all of my personal e-mail addresses is quite easy whether I'm on my home computer or my office computer. Not to mention that I have a centralized address book and everything is now fully web-based. Plus, iCal can "subscribe" to my Google Calendar.

RSS + Calendar + Gmail =
Combine all of this with the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader widgets that I can place on my customized Google Homepage, and I really have all of my favorite daily tools one click away via my web browser. Very, very handy. And best of all, it's all accessible via my BlackBerry. Previously, any e-mails that were downloaded to Entourage on my home computer were essentially in a black hole where I could never get back to them unless I remote-accessed the machine or kept a copy on the server. I've never enjoyed either of these two methods -- now I have a central source for all of my contacts, mail, and scheduling that lives outside of the office.