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Ask HN: All Startup communication+docs with Google?

6 points by mattjung ↗ HN
Would you rely on Google (gmail/Google docs) for all your internal startup communication and document management? Can I be sure, e.g. to get some quick support when my critical data is not accessible for whatever reason? Or would it be more reasonable to go for a pay solution? Any experiences? Is the risk affordable?

8 comments

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quizbiz
Take advantage while you can, back everything up on a physical drive. Worst comes to worst, migrate from your drive to another service.
patio11
Google is good at many things. Uptime is one of them. Individualized attention to support requests, not so much.

I use Google mail for my business. In ~2 years it has been inaccessible to me twice, both times for less than an hour. I got access back at the same time as the other millions of people who were locked out.

nr0mx
Don't both Gmail and Google Docs come with offline support these days ? If it's access to data you're worried about, you could also use other apps to backup this data. e.g Thunderbird for email. I remember a fairly recent Lifehacker article about a python script that downloads all your Google Docs, which might be a decent solution when run with a scheduler.
intranation
We use Google Apps for all of our start-up communication/document infrastructure. It works pretty well, and is obviously compatible with most email clients/calendars people prefer to use on their desktop.

One thing to be careful of: Yahoo! Mail has been filing emails sent from our domain (and others I've heard about) directly to the spam folder - and these aren't bulk emails, just person-to-person emails. We had to enter into a lengthy discussion with Yahoo! support about getting our emails marked as ham: and we lost quite a few investment opportunities because of these missing emails.

mattjung
I was originally thinking of the free version of Googles web-applications. Switching to Google Apps (the 50$ version) could effectively take away some of my concerns, especially support
dvv
we use. it works. forget about critical docs, they should stay local.
paulsingh
We use it as well -- no real issues yet. FWIW, I also use a local IMAP client to keep a backup copy... just in case.

Setup Google Apps for your startup and then start working. IMHO, this is the least of your concerns at the moment.

izak30
I use google docs for 99% of stuff. Critical docs and spreadsheets though stay local, with OpenOffice, and synced with my partners via dropbox.