Why Google Apps Users Miss Out on Regular Gmail Features

Still FAR to com­plex for the aver­age user, Google attempts to “clar­ify” the com­plex­i­ties of their Google Apps product.

Via: Why Google Apps Users Miss Out on Reg­u­lar Gmail Features—and Some Solu­tions [Annoyances]

If you’ve taken the leap and hosted your domain email and other ser­vices with Google Apps, no doubt you’ve noticed that you miss out on ser­vices that “reg­u­lar” accounts get: like Google Reader, Voice, Wave, Ana­lyt­ics, and right now, Buzz. Here’s why:

After com­plain­ing about the dis­par­i­ties on a recent episode of This Week in Google, a help­ful Googler unof­fi­cially got in touch to clar­ify. Let’s call her/him “Help­ful McGoogler.” Here’s what HM said.

To the user, it may appear that there are three types of Google accounts: Gmail accounts, Google accounts, and Google Apps (for your domain) accounts. In truth, there’s only one kind of account: a Google Account.

Help­ful McGoogler explains:

Abstract the idea of a “Google Account” from being asso­ci­ated with Gmail or Google Apps. You can tie ANY email address to a “Google Account.”

Check out https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount and notice that it asks you for your “cur­rent email address.” So let’s say I go to school at Big Uni­ver­sity and I have an email address helpfulmcgoogler@biguni.edu… I can use that email address while sign­ing up and that will be my login name to access Google services.

Some of the con­fu­sion that leads to “you must have a gmail.com address” to access Google ser­vices is because a “Google Account” comes “for free” when you open a Gmail account. So using a gmail address always ‘just works.’

Google Apps accounts pro­vide “hosted ser­vices,” which don’t include every­thing vanilla Google accounts get.

Help­ful McGoogler says:

When you open a Google Apps domain account. You are essen­tially cre­at­ing a branded Google Account world for the Google ser­vices your domain is host­ing. You can see your ser­vices at https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[domain.name]/Dashboard.

So, let’s say you have a Google Apps domain that is example.com and you cre­ated a user gina@example.com. You will be able to log-in with gina@example.com for all your Google Apps hosted ser­vices. Typ­i­cally this is email, docs, cal­en­dar, and con­tacts… but you can click the “add more ser­vices” link to expand that. Right now, you won’t find stuff like Reader, Google Voice, AdWords, Finance, Ana­lyt­ics, etc… but still there is some inter­est­ing stuff in there.

But what if you want to access ALL ser­vices through a sin­gle email address?

Help­ful McGoogler says:

What you do is cre­ate a NORMAL Google Account (described at the begin­ning) and asso­ciate it with your gina@example.com email address. That “vanilla” google account will now have access to all (well, I think all) Google ser­vices. You can have a Reader account, a Voice account, an Ana­lyt­ics account, etc all asso­ci­ated with your non-gmail address. It can even have the same password—but it doesn’t need to—to make it seem like it’s the same account… but in real­ity, it’s a very sep­a­rate account.

Still, this just means you have two dif­fer­ent Google accounts, with dif­fer­ent Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar and Google Docs data on each. A Google Apps account pro­vides a sub­set of the ser­vices you get with a reg­u­lar Google Account, and so dupli­cates those sets of data on those ser­vices. This is the sce­nario I com­plained about on TWiG.

Help­ful McGoogler acknowl­edges that this is indeed a problem:

Here is a sce­nario that really trips peo­ple up… Let say you are using your gina@example.com email and are all happy that you have your con­tacts all in-line and orga­nized and filled out. Now you go and cre­ate a vanilla Google Account using your gina@example.com email address (mostly because you want to use Google Voice and Google Reader with the same log-in as your Apps account—btw, this was totally me a cou­ple years ago). When you set up some­thing like Google Voice, you will expect your con­tacts to be full of all the good­ness you set up in your gina@example.com “hosted gmail” instance… you will be dis­ap­pointed to find your con­tacts are empty.

This is because the vanilla Google Account that is being used for Google Voice will be access­ing a DIFFERENT “Con­tacts” ser­vice which has no data (sad­ness). My ugly solu­tion was to ini­tially export the con­tacts from my Google Apps Account and import them to my Google vanilla Account and try to keep them in sync when I make edits.

This dou­ble set of Con­tacts espe­cially stinks for Android users who sign into Android with their Google Apps account, because your Google Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar are baked into your phone setup.

Help­ful McGoogler is with me on this:

When you add Android into the mix, Con­tacts get weird. Because, I think, you can add your Google Apps account to Android and not your gina@example.com “vanilla” Google Account. (GT: Yes, this is true.) But, when you sign in to Google Voice on Android, you will need to enter the pass­word (which might be the same) of your vanilla Google Account. BUT, on Android, your Con­tacts are read from the system’s phone book. Not nec­es­sar­ily the vanilla Google Voice Google Account that has its sep­a­rate con­tacts (acces­si­ble through the nor­mal Google Voice webapp). Ugh. The “Con­tacts” issue is by far the most ‘hurt­ing’ in this whole scenario.

Yup. Cal­en­dar is also an issue.

I thought this was the full extent of the prob­lem, so it’s nice to have even unof­fi­cial con­fir­ma­tion from the horse’s mouth. Help­ful McGoogler DID say s/he thought the teams at Google are aware of the issue and are work­ing to address it. It also sounds like some bits of Android need to get refac­tored to work seam­lessly with both vanilla Google accounts and Google Apps accounts.

After that episode of TWiG aired, at least three lis­ten­ers emailed me say­ing they use third-party ser­vice Soo­cial to sync Con­tacts across their mul­ti­ple Google/Google Apps accounts. I haven’t tried this myself—and you may have to enter your Google account pass­word into Soo­cial to set it up, which is a big red flag—but it’s something.

Are you hav­ing the Google Apps account dilemma? What are you doing to deal with it? Let’s hear it in the comments.

Google, Gmail, and Google Apps Accounts Explained [Smarterware]

Smarter­ware is Life­hacker edi­tor emer­i­tus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the lat­est from Smarter­ware, be sure to sub­scribe to the Smarter­ware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarter­ware fea­ture here on Lifehacker.