Google Apps For Domains Migration
At work we’d been kicking around a migration from our IMAP/SMTP hosted email service for a good while now. Our provider was top notch, but we wanted shared calendars & workspaces too, so we needed to move on. We could have deployed something like Exchange internally, but that means buying in another server, Windows, Exchange, SharePoint and anti-virus software, getting it all put together, and then spending the time maintaining it and fixing it when it breaks. Our engineering resources are a) pretty much fully committed and b) not Windows specialists, so we’d probably end up subbing it out to a contractor. We’re a small bunch (9 inboxes and another 20 distribution lists and email aliases), so the €7k+ spend over 3 years (€260/inbox/year) to deploy this solution didn’t make much sense.
Outsourcing to a managed service provider is the only thing that makes sense if you’re small and have these functionality requirements. I could sign up with someone like Intermedia on a syndicated Exchange server for $125/month. ActiveSync (mobile device synchronisation) is another $2.95/inbox/month, and there’s loads more optional, but essential extras, like additional storage. Basically at the end of it you’re looking at €150/inbox/year, which is a big improvement, especially when it means that I’ve no hardware to manage, and no housekeeping to do.
Google have had their Google Apps for Domains suite out for a year or so now. You get Gmail with your own domain name instead of @gmail.com, a calendar app, a basic browser based word processor, presentation & spreadsheet app that allows multiple users update the same file simultaneously, and a Wiki. We started using it informally when they launched the “Team Edition”, that gave you everything but Gmail, so you didn’t have to move away from your email provider. The Premier Edition gives you 25GB inboxes for $50/inbox/year, and the standard edition, with conventional Gmail adverts and a 6GB inbox is free!
We went with Google and threw the switch last Tuesday and it’s bedding in nicely. Over the past week though a couple of “wouldn’t it be nice if…” things have come up:
- Full contact information, and not just name & email address would be good.
- Proper contact sharing would be nice. Contacts are shared, but only in as much as the auto-complete function can pull addresses from other employee’s address books when you’re composing an email on gmail.com.
- The ability to sync contacts with Outlook and mobile devices would be a huge step forward.