Replacing Outlook with Gmail

So I drive some of my friends crazy hounding them to get rid of their Outlook, among other microsucks products (please switch to openoffice if you are reading this). I can't help it, I'm a fan of things other than Microsoft, and I like to do things just a bit differently when I can. Maybe it makes me feel like a superior snob, I don't know. Anyway, Firefox and Google are certainly doing their part in making it easy for me to never use a Redmond product. I have replaced all of my desktop calendar, email, task, etc. tools with Google products and Firefox add-ons.

Gmail is the hub. I have several email accounts converging there and Gmail let's me send mail as whichever identity I like for a particular email. With the 7+ GB (and growing) size of the mailbox, I never have to delete anything or worry about running out of room. They good folks at Gmail have been steadily adding features lately that allow me to do more there and to get rid of some of the FF add-ons I had for things like tasks. You need to have the "labs" section enabled to get some of these things working. So the email part is obvious, for the most part. I get objections like "but it doesn't have folders for my email". If you're using FF(and you should be), a few add-ons are a must until Google gets native support for this and a few other things. See my post about FF add-ons. Better Gmail gives you hierarchical folders for gmail, just like your precious Outlook. And Xoopit organizes the pictures, videos, and files you receive in your email automatically and awesomely. Choosing an email or a contact will render a complete (Xoopit-based) list of any files sent from that person at any time. The search for your mail is from Google, of course, and is a billion times better than the search feature in your puny Outlook. You can find that needle in your million-email haystack whenever you need to, with ease.

Alright, so we've established that you need Firefox as your browser and Gmail as your email client. Then there's the calendar. I use Google calendar for a variety of reasons. It may not have all of the features of some other calendar clients, but it has most of them, it's easy to use, and it is integrated well with Gmail (obviously). You can easily share and manage multiple calendars of your own or your family, staff, etc. I have a personal and a work calendar and share my wife's calendar, as well as 9 or 10 shared calendars from different people at work. You can show any of them you want at a given time to see overlaps or conflicts, and easily drag and drop items to change times or copy items from one calendar to another. Gmail labs now has an integrated calendar view sidebar so you can see your month at a glance and upcoming agenda items on the same page as your email. You can also create a new calendar event from emails or, with the (awesome) Ubiquity FF add-on, from anything on any web page. The calendar is also easily sync-ed OTA with my BlackBerry.

Using Google Docs and the integrated Docs sidebar for Gmail allows quick access to text, spreadsheet, slideshow, and other documents. Gmail labs also now allows you to create a document out of any email, a very nice feature indeed. I use Google Docs extensively and convinced my company to use it for central storage of and distribution of company documents, so these kinds of features are invaluable to me.

The new integrated tasks feature in Gmail is very basic, but very functional and meets my needs. It has a nice feature of making a task out of an email with a click or 2, which helps me to remember things I need to do from emails without having to remember which colored stars I use for what (another labs feature).

This addresses the basic needs of an office suite, but there are many more advanced functions you can squeeze out of your Google/Firefox environment that will do just about anything you can think of to make you more productive and organized. What tricks do you make your Gmail do to replace other apps?