People can get very tense when you tell them you are going to replace Outlook and Exchange with a new email system. After all, it seems like your whole life is documented in Outlook. Everything is organized, everything is running smoothly, making changes can only lead to chaos. Right? Well… change happens and if your organization decides to make the lead to Google Apps Email you need to be prepared. One of the most significant changes you’ll encounter in Google Apps is a new approach towards organization which replaces Outlook’s folders with a series of labels and flags with stars.

If you have spent years carefully placing messages in appropriate folders and enjoy the satisfaction of having everything “properly” filed you are in for a major change. Google’s design seems to be focused on minimizing email housekeeping chores by locating the item you are looking for with minimal effort by you. If you try to recreate your Outlook filing system in Google you are missing the intent of this design and making things harder than necessary. On the other hand, if you prefer to leave your email in a heap rather than spend time organizing it then Google’s interface will seem natural. Between Labels and Search everyone can find a level of organization that suits them.

With Outlook folders, a mail message can only reside in one place so you have to derive a folder hierarchy that makes sense to you personally. Google uses labels rather than Folders. Each conversation can receive multiple labels and each label becomes a custom (filtered) view of your mail. A conversation about giving Mary a bonus for her great work on the London project can be labeled with “Staff”, “Bonuses” and “London Project”. If you need to retrieve this email at her next performance review you can select “London Project” or one of the other labels to see all the relevant conversations. If you don’t spot the conversation you are looking for you can apply a second label or just search on appropriate key words.

In addition to labels, another tool in finding the right mail item quickly is the Search function. Google search on email is extremely fast and convenient. You can even preserve common searches by building a “Filter” to see only those mail items that fit your specified criteria. The result of all this is that you can significantly reduce time spent organizing mail and instantly find any mail conversation with just a few key strokes.

The search feature is very fast and accurate but it takes time for Outlook users to trust it. Search in Outlook has been so bad for so long that most Outlook users have become experts at tending their folders and PST archives. The key to acceptance of Google Mail is to embrace the notion that you can always find any piece of mail in just a few key strokes. This allows you to spend a lot less time organizing your mail compared to Outlook. Remember: The only email actions that represent productive work are composing and reading your mail. Everything else is just overhead.

Any change to your personal system of organization is disruptive in the short term but once you get used to leveraging the power of Google Apps you will find your productivity significantly increased.

Stay tuned for Part 2 - The Gmail Inbox: Threads, Stars, and Mail Options