Things have been progressing nicely here at Brave Location as I’m ramping up to leaving Microsoft and setting out on my own. After a *lot* of deliberation on trying to find a company name I was happy with and had an available domain name, I wanted to set up all the things I’d need whilst getting going.

Specifically I wanted email, calendaring, web site hosting, collaboration tools, project tracking – all for as little cost as possible but with the potential to expand as (hopefully) the company expands.

Most of these requirements have been met by Google Apps – specifically the communication parts. The Standard Edition is free for up to 50 users – which should be good for a while J - and offers personalised Gmail accounts, calendars, Google docs and the SharePoint-like (well sort of!) Google Sites.

For the company website, I’ve knocked together a quick site using Google App Engine and used the feature allowed in Google Apps to allow http://bravelocation.appspot.com/ to be mapped to the much more friendly http://www.bravelocation.com/

It’s a bit disappointing that there isn’t really an equivalent offering from Microsoft. All the parts are available but are rather fragmented across Windows Live, Office Live and Windows Azure. Maybe this will get sorted soon, but for the small business who just wants to get up and running, the Google offering is just about perfect.

For project tracking, I’ve started with the so far excellent (and free) Pivotal Tracker. I may also investigate using some sort of Scrum-based template in Google Docs Spreadsheets, although initial investigations didn’t find anything great so far. I’m not sure Google Docs spreadsheets really have the features available to drive a really powerful application-like spreadsheet, but it’s fun to investigate more.

I’m going to experiment with working as much as possible using only online tools, and have also now switched full time to using the much quicker Chrome rather than IE8. I’m still not really convinced by the rather basic interface of Chrome, but the speed increase especially in the beta of version 4 is very noticeable.

So is there anything Google that I’ve not switched to? Well actually I’m sticking with Bing for now. I’ve obviously been using Bing for quite a while having worked in the Bing Commerce team for quite a while, but I really do think the relevance is different but generally at least as good whilst the UX is definitely superior.