On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Jeremy Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: > I was just informed by my boss that we will activly be presuing > using Google Aps Enterprise in our company and if the 30 day > trial goes well, then we will be off Exchange and using Google Aps.
I strongly second what MBS said. It's all about cost/benefit. What does Exchange cost you, and how does it benefit you? What will Gmail cost you, and how will it benefit you? Who has the higher ratio? Maybe Google really *is* a better proposition for you. How should *we* know? :) Costs have to include not just license costs (Exchange) or service fees (Google), but admin time and user time and infrastructure costs. Do you spend lots of money on Exchange server hardware? Will you have to spend lots of money of faster/redundant/reliable Internet feeds? Offline use and Internet reliability are a big question mark for me. If your Internet feed is impaired (slow), will your organization find the system unusable for the duration? What about laptop users? Information assurance is another big question. While I don't distrust Google more than I distrust any large company, and I believe Google has more staying power than some other "web service" providers, I still worry about what happens if they decide that product just isn't working and cancel/change things. At least with Exchange, even if Microsoft decides to cancel the product (hypothetically), the server I have now will keep running for years until we can work out a migration plan. If Google shuts down, you loose everything immediately. What features of Exchange/Outlook do you use? MBS has good list. Compare how they will work for you in the two services. Not just "Does it have feature X?", but, "How easy is it to do X?" If you've got a lot of power users who make use of Exchange features in Outlook, will retraining for the Google methods be a big deal? Make sure Google gives you an *iron clad* agreement. It should spell out acceptable service and how that's measured (and who does the measuring), and what the penalties are. For a lot of services, the penalties are for hours of uninterrupted service, which means they can be unreliable as hell but still collect most of their fee. You want a strong profit incentive for them to not suck. If at all possible, work on getting a pilot program where a few people have their mail forwarded to/from Google, and use it that way for a *couple months*. 1500 accounts should be enough to entice Google into giving you that kind of trial. (If they balk, threaten to walk, and magic will happen.) There's nothing like hands-on experience to tell you how something will fly in the real world. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
