With all the Web 2.0 goodness out there and what The Economist is telling us you may be forgiven for thinking that it’d be trivial to equip a team of six with the tools needed to become TNBT*

Wrong.

Let’s start with the basic stuff (I’ll leave the best ’til last). We have a BT ADSL line which gives us an office phone too and we connect our Dell Lattitude D620s wirelessly to the web via a NetGear DG834GT.

We also installed an old Axis 2100 webcam (it runs Linux and is it’s own web server). As our BT ADSL line doesn’t give us a fixed IP address we used DynDNS dynamic DNS service to allow access from the web. Although the router works out of the box with DynDNS, port 80 didn’t seem to work so we’re using port 8000. It is supposedly possible to embed the feed into a page but after trying for what was too long I gave up and stuck with the native web page that the Axis provides.

For office apps we’re using, well, Office. After using Writely and EditGrid I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to use something else because of the time to get up to speed.

What about Google Apps, I hear? Well I did plump for (which recently got a nice look and feel overhaul) for e-mail and calendaring. Since I signed up Google has started offering Google Apps with phone support, 10Gb of email storage and a 99.9% uptime guarantee for $50 per user per year but I’d rather they sorted the Apps (specifically Gmail and Calendar) out first.

I suppose that the fact that these products are still in beta should be a warning for potential users. The calendar is far from complete with the inability to restrict the view to the hours in a working day being the first annoyance. It can also be clunky with appointments becoming unmovable without logging in and out again. The inability to scroll across days or to effectively print from the Agenda view are also usability defects. Then there is the Google Apps for Domains “feature” than prevents recreation of a deleted account for five working days (I wanted to change the way a name appeared in the address book).

Doh!

Speaking of address books, the shared address book only exists for users of the domain (i.e. external contacts cannot be added and shared).

We’re also using CentralDesktop as a collaboration tool. It out-wikis SocialText if you ask me and versions all documents automatically just like a wiki. It’s proved great for agreeing changes to documents - changes made by one person appear nearly instantly for anyone else viewing the document. As an added bonus EditGrid embedded spreadsheets appeared as a feature last week.

On the hosting front, I set up a Yahoo! Small Business Hosting account. For around £12 a month this gives you a domain (including registration), multiple blogs (WordPress or Movable Type) as well as access to MySQL and PHP. PHP was useful for being able to make the blog appear as the homepage, but utilising MySQL to collect ideas became problematic. Try as Stew might, he couldn’t get INSERT access to the database that he created. So, we decided to move to 1and1; and although the transfer was a bit scary (being right before we’re due to go a bit more public) it all worked very smoothly.

So what’s the message here? If your needs are really basic and you’re willing to put up with unfinished applications, then you can probably get away comfortably with Google Apps for Domains and a hosting service like Yahoo Small Business. However, if you need just one additional little thing, then you’re stuck and will need to resort to something more flexible (or just familiar).

Corporate IT departments have some time left still and if they’re smart they’ll be speaking to the likes of Google about what they’d need to do to make chosing their services a no-brainer.

So what’s been the best bit of kit we’ve used?

Without a doubt it’s been the stands for our laptops.

*The Next Big Thing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Software, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.