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Enjoy !!!

there is no, zero, i mean absolutely no support for contacts as I understand them (data fields, GUIs, bidirectional synchronization (hell, even unidirectional synchronization) are all absent and/or impossible).

Do this if you doubt me. Take a reasonable contact list (let's say 500 contacts with an average of 10 data fields (addresses, phones, etc) in each) import them to gApps/gMail then export them and reimport to your source contact manager (phone/program/whatever). Your data will be mostly gone and what remains will be so hopelessly mangled you may as well shoot yourself.

Which is what I wanted to do after a 2 week review of gApps where I tried EVERY workaound imaginable to their contact non-management left me despondent.

I ended up keeping my clients either on Exchange or in Yahoo.

Too bad the rest of gApps isn't bad.

Tsk. Chances are if you're dealing with 500 contacts you're probably a business, which means you should then be using their Enterprise version. At $50 head/year, it may look like alot on paper but then thats negated by...wait for it...dedicated support.

People using the free version, like myself, are forced to help eachother and delve into the murky depths of newsgroups once more, after I had assumed them to be banished away forever.

Google docs has all of your business work and the US government or some Google competitor goes on a fishing expedition and requests every single document in Google Apps. The US courts support the application and without notification all of your business documents go to a third party.

At least of you host your own data, the courts has to tell you that they want your data and it will be because you are already involved in the case.

I wouldn't touch Google Apps unless they allowed me to configure their interface so that the data never left my networks. I read in the Reg that US courts have ruled that even data in RAM is in storage and is subject to the discovery phase of a court case. If it touches a Google server it is as good as in the public domain.