Life is so much organized with good personal domain name & Google Apps

I recently acquired the domain prashanth.net, there’s no domain left with this name since it’s a very common name in South India. And also blame it on Tamil Star Prashanth So, one & a half year running backorder finally accomplished the domain. Now what!!? Since the domain is really good, I wanted all my stuff to come under it! I started learning jQuery & built a pretty neat home page for prashanth.net. Moved my personal blog to this domain & made the previous domain to redirect here (permanent, wildcard).  These were all initial setup. One of the main reasons for buying this domain was having a nice email ID which stands out!

Google Apps Registration:

There’s no better option than Google Apps account which comes for free (Standard Edition). I registered the domain with Google Apps account & did all initial setup of creating MX records to make email to work.

Email, IM Migration:

Since I wanted a complete shift to this new ID from my Gmail, I wanted to move all my mails for future refernce. I setup the mail fetcher which is available under “Settings–>Accounts–>Get mail from other accounts”. This mail fetcher copied all mails from my gmail ID to new Google Apps account, though it took few days! Similarly moved contacts with Import & Export options which gmail has.  Once email gets activated, it automatically activates IM. You can use Google Talk to connect with all other people who are on Gmail or Google Apps account. I couldn’t tell everyone on my Google Talk about my migration to new personalized ID. I used answer.im to auto respond those who try to contact me on my old gmail ID. Answer.im makes you look online all the time & when somebody pings, it replies with the message you have set.

Docs, Calendar & Custom URL:

Google Apps account also comes with other services from Google, Docs & Calendar. So all these services looks more personalized when you have custom URLs. Setting up custom URLs is very simple, you just need to change it in Google Apps service settings & create appropriate CNAME records on your domain. It might sound a bit geeky, but nothing once you know how to do it. So with Google Apps services & custom URLs, I actually got the following:

Mail: http://mail.prashanth.net

Calendar: http://cal.prashanth.net

Docs: http://docs.prashanth.net

Life looks so simple & organized now! And also gives personalization touch to it! Beleive it or not, I don’t have a office suite installed on my computers. I am a fulltime user of Google Docs! Docs also provides offline access to all your documents on it. All you have to do is enable offline access (requirs Google Gears installed). You can access, modify all your docs even when not connected to internet & all the changes you have made get syncronized when you connect next time.

Syncing with Mobile Phone:

I have Nokia E66, Symbian S60 3rd edition phone. I use System Seven push email service to receive emails in real time. System Seven recently launched syncing contacts & calendar with Gmail/Google Apps. With that my phone’s calendar is always in sync with my online calendar. It doesn’t matter whether I add an event on mobile’s calendar or my google calendar, it gets reflected everywhere.