Suppose, for Father’s Day, you got dear old Dad some new power tools, and he then had trouble adjusting to them. One way of speeding up the acclimation process could involve trashing the old ones, right? Now, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook seems to have created a similar situation.
Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook launched about a week ago with the goal of helping people make a smooth transition from Microsoft’s offering to the Google’s alternative. But in the past 24 hours, Google and Microsoft have both made announcements about different problems.
On the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Chris Vander Mey, a senior product manager, started by admitting last night, “[S]ome plug-ins don’t yet work with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few of the more common ones: Microsoft Office Outlook Connector, Acrobat PDF Maker Toolbar, [and] Outlook Change Notifier.”
Furthermore, “Windows Desktop Search will not properly index Google Apps Sync data files, so in order to stop indexing from running indefinitely, the Google Apps Sync installer disables it.”
Dev Balasubramanian, a product manager, then chimed in this morning on the Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog. He wrote (and bolded and italicized), “The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data.”
So Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook should certainly help users get off the Google-Microsoft fence. It’s just hard to say if it represents more of a helping hand than a hardened boot, or if all of them will wind up going over to Google’s side as planned.
