I think GMail's IMAP implementation is OK. Since labels are mapped to folders, you can see a message appear in multiple folders. Deleting/copying/moving usually does the right thing (removing/adding tags). The same can't be said for the GASMO tool! The problems we've have are related to very large mailboxes with lots of folders. The IMAP client in older Outlooks was very bad IMO. In newer ones it seems better, but they've remove the option to download headers only. Syncs seem to take a long time and often never complete. IMAP rates are throttled by Google which doesn't help large syncs. We also have some shared mailboxes that people use to replace the old "Public Folders" feature of Exchange. Dragging and dropping between accounts in Outlook is unreliable with IMAP and GASMO. A couple of users with large mailboxes have managed to break their treasured folder structure completely, and none of the available Google Apps backup systems do a decent job of restoring. This gets towards the main problem of this approach. You are meant to use labels in GMail in quite a different way to the traditional folder hierarchy favoured by some email users (me too, once upon a time). Tag emails for actions/status. Use search to find emails rather than filing them. If you stick with IMAP, you are never encouraged to transition to this native way of doing things, and will never get the full benefit. It also means that Outlook or IMAP users who try to view their email in Gmail web will have a horrible experience because it doesn't deal with large folder structures well. I've used GMail with Thunderbird in the past and it's a perfectly fine way of doing it, but after the pain of switching to the web client I would not go back. I liken it to doing something like switching from Delphi to C# and then trying to write C# like it's Pascal all the time instead of writing idiomatic C#. Possible, yes, but probably not ideal. Above is my personal slant - IMAP will probably work fine for lots of people. I was thinking about it from a point of view of an IT staffer who has to support a roll out. If you allow Outlook and other clients, it will cause more of a drag on support in the long run.

We made this switch in 2012, replacing in-house Exchange-clone servers (Zarafa). It's been great in terms of taking the job of maintaining mail servers away from our limited IT team. We made things unnecessarily hard for ourselves by not training or supporting users properly. I encourage you to invest in training up a few people at least, who can then support their colleagues. Most important point - if you do everything in Google Apps via the web, you will experience happiness (after the initial pain of adjustment). If you try to use Outlook (or to a lesser extent IMAP clients), or the Google drive sync tool, or any other non-web tools, you will experience pain. The Google Apps Sync for MS Outlook is at best a sticking plaster. Do not rely on it long term. Especially since those who cling to Outlook will be the power users (probably your senior sales people and C-level execs) who will have the greatest trouble with GASMO. The exception here - the Active Directory sync tools work very well. Our company now splits into those who love GMail, a large number who don't really care either way, and a small number of Outlook zealots who hate it with a passion. If you want the migration to be successful, IMO you must mandate an end-date for Outlook and move everyone to the web clients. Support them with training, tips, hand-holding, bribes, whatever, but just do it. Oh, and the multiple-account support of Google stuff on web and Android phones is pretty much universally awesome. You should have no problems there. Everyone else should learn from how well this works. I suggest making use of the multiple users feature in Chrome, although you can usually switch within each app too.

In the "not counted" range I had a ZX81 and two rubber key ZX Spectrum 48k (an issue 1 with the hand mods on the board, and an issue 2 when that broke). Then I had a couple of ACT Sirius computers (early PC clones, called Victor 9000 in the USA) that were cast-offs from my dad's office. The first had twin 5.25" floppy, the second had a 5MB hard drive! Both ran MSDOS 1.0 (although I think I later got my hands on 3.0). We then had an Acorn Archimedes A440, followed by an Acorn Risc PC - those were some of the best computers I ever owned to this day. When the Sirius died we broke it for parts and used the HDD and the PSU on the table attached the A440, for extra storage. Since then, I succumbed the x86 hegemony and ran a series of cheap boring PCs. At school I used some fun machines too. An RM 380Z running CPM, many BBC Model B machines, an Amstrad thing that ran CPM and had Logo, and a CBM 4032 which was like a Commodore PET but with a better keyboard.

Is it just me or is retrieving profile/role info for a user incredibly slow? I used some code that creates an ODS for membership, profile and role info and tried to show all users in a grid on a small site with about 110 users and it takes 2m25s to do it. Admittedly that's a local asp.net test server fetching from remote MS SQL DB over my 1Mb/s ADSL, but even when both web and db servers and colocated, it's not much better. Generally, why would I not store most user info in a table of my own making with loweredusername as the key?

Awesome thread and most of my fave movies appear in here, but why has no-one mentioned Demon Seed? I know it has its faults but it's an amazing film. Demon Seed Matrix Blade Runner Andromeda Strain Logan's Run 12 Monkeys 2001: Space Odyssey THX 1138 Akira Alphaville (A randomish "top 10" that may or may not be the same next time you ask me). From the comment elsewhere about old sci-fi fans, I'm 35. I love the new stuff, but somehow the movies I saw when very young like Andromeda Strain, Logan's Run and Demon Seed went in very deep.

We used to have a project where if you logged in as a developer you got different tips of the day, which were a collection of found stuff and unix fortune gems. One that is relevant here is:- "Debugging is at least twice as hard as programming. If your code is as clever as you can possibly make it, then by definition you're not smart enough to debug it." - Brian Kernighan When I started that job I was into clever code too, but the guy I was working with had been programming a long time and soon taught me that readability and maintainability is (almost) all. As he said "'Clever' in coding terms is usual a derogatory term". He also used to say that "premature optimisation is the root of much evil" which is another lesson I needed to learn as a rookie, to avoid me spending time and adding complexity trying to pointlessly optimise some non-essential bit of code. All rookie programmers should spend some time working with a good, experienced mentor IMO. It may be painful to the ego at the time but it's good for you in the long term!