Google Apps Premium feasibility.. ?

[Sasiki]

I am planning a server migration in August from Unix to Windows. The unix box is currently our application and e-mail server. We will be migrating to a Windows Server. I have to figure out what I want to do with e-mail. There will be probably 60 users total. Any of you guys have experience with Google Apps premium? This takes care of shared calendars, shared contacts, data backups, webmail, etc. The cost is 50 per year per user, so about $3000 per year. The cost of an Exchange server + CAL's would be around $12,000. It would also eliminate by Barracuda Spam Firewall + the maintenance for it which is about $300/yr.

What would you think the pros and cons would be of this type of deployment?

 

[marley1]

I would say Exchange, because I dont think Blackberry or Windows Mobile will sync up with google apps, but i could be completely wrong.

You dont have to use a barracuda, would be cheaper to go with Google Postini, which is like 1 buck a year per user i think. I haven't used that yet cause it offers no support, and I just use Postini through a reseller, but should be good too.

 

[Grentz]

Exchange is still better integrated and accepted in the industry (especially for things like marley1 said such as Blackberries and WMobile devices).

Google Apps is awesome as well, but a bit simplistic at times. I love it personally and use it to host a few of my small domains for very light office use and personal stuff and it works great, very reliable, etc.

The main thing would be that Exchange is going to be more expensive, more maintenance intensive, and more powerful and customizable. Google Apps comes as it is, is more simplistic, but much cheaper and very little maintenance you have to do.

 

[Sasiki]

The only Blackberry within the company is mine, so that's not an issue. We currently use Sendmail on Unix.. standard POP access. There are no shared calendars, contacts, email backups, etc. Google Apps would actually be a fairly large step up from where we are now. Thanks for the replies!

 

[marley1]

sounds like you made up your mind =)

could also look into hosted exchange, a little more but not that much more.

 

[niccoli]

My company just converted from IMAP/POP3 to Google Apps. We have 25 employees, google apps costs us $1250 per year. We compared GA vs exchange over a 3 year life span as we assumed that in 3 years we would want to upgrade to something newer on the exchange side. We also were trying to plan for growth over the next 3 years go scale from 25 users today to around 150 in the next 3 years. Cost outlay was right around 10k for Exchange 2008 to get in the door with servers and 25 users vs google apps which was $3750 over 3 years. Some of the exchange features are missed but most of the users have gotten used to the web based Google Apps, and those that have not just keep using IMAP/POP3 with GA archiving on send/receive for POP3. Google has a calendar sync utility for outlook that syncs the calendar. The only real complaint that I have had to date is the lack of to-do lists and being able to hand out tasks to other people. Outside of that the users like it much more, spam is down due to postini and we have message retention out to 3 months included as well which is good from a compliance standpoint.

We have 2 blackberries, we just use IMAP and it works okay, definitely not the best but it gets the job done, if you want better google interaction there is a blackberry google apps for domains application that gives you more of the tag/archive type features. There is also a calendar sync application that 2-way sync's your bb calendar. I would guess that contact sync will be along in the next few months as google released the contacts API end of April/start of May.

 

[Sasiki]

sounds like you made up your mind =)

could also look into hosted exchange, a little more but not that much more.

I had looked into hosted exchange. That typically runs $150 per user per year.

 

[Sasiki]

My company just converted from IMAP/POP3 to Google Apps...

Thank you for the feedback. It sounds like it was a good move for your company. When it comes closer to time, I will show the solution to our CEO and Sales Manager and see where it ends up.

 

[shade91]

Google Apps is great for home office/small biz, possibly medium-sized businesses. It's a freaking nightmare using GMail if you have 1000's of emails in your inbox. Their 'labels' idea is a total joke. I prefer folders.

We have a BES, a Cisco CallManager deployment, and inventory systems linked directly with our Exchange setup. Absolutely impossible to get away from this

 

[Sasiki]

Google Apps is great for home office/small biz, possibly medium-sized businesses. It's a freaking nightmare using GMail if you have 1000's of emails in your inbox. Their 'labels' idea is a total joke. I prefer folders.

We have a BES, a Cisco CallManager deployment, and inventory systems linked directly with our Exchange setup. Absolutely impossible to get away from this

If I go the Google Apps route, most users will still likely still use Outlook for retrieving messages, but on a positive note, all messages will still be on Gmail for them to read if they are away from the office.

 

[CEpeep]

If I go the Google Apps route, most users will still likely still use Outlook for retrieving messages, but on a positive note, all messages will still be on Gmail for them to read if they are away from the office.

Same would also be true if you were using Exchange due to Outlook Web Access.
Note: I'm not advocating Exchange. We use it here where I work and I can't stand it. The server is a pain in the ass to support an maintain, something you should definitely factor into your cost analysis as well. If I were going to run anything new in house these days, I'd probably go with Zimbra.

 

[Duster]

Google apps does sync with blackberry's according to this

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/mobile.html

I didn't really read through it nor do I use it so YMMV

 

[priteshvarsani]

Same would also be true if you were using Exchange due to Outlook Web Access.
Note: I'm not advocating Exchange. We use it here where I work and I can't stand it. The server is a pain in the ass to support an maintain, something you should definitely factor into your cost analysis as well. If I were going to run anything new in house these days, I'd probably go with Zimbra.

I feel you pain bruv!
We are already moving to zimbra here at work (we have got a linux admin hired now) so our job for the last few weeks was to install ubuntu to a set of brand new HP servers and configure up zimbra and its dependincies.

My boss wouldnt accept the use of anything opensource a few years ago! Its advanced so much now though, i have to be honest im glad were bringin linux in now, its so much more simple once u get over the task of navigating the DAUNTING command shell.

We are now finally at the stage of decommisioning our exchange servers and turning two of them into oracle servers, and the third into the main app server for our primary intranet. Im trying to get used to zimbra now, and im even learning a lot more about linux now, A big step in the life of a windows admin!

Getting the network users to use zimbra is a different matter, they should get used to it. We have also taken the decision to use mainly the web interface and only configure outlook on some peoples accounts.

I only wish that zimbra liked active directory more, as right now we got one ldap directory and our primary active directory. It isnt too much of a problem though.

Zimbra is SOOO easy to administrate i must be honest, compared to the days of exchange system manager and unstable mmc consoles, where you had to go through a million property screens just to allow users to send and receive mail on a new internet domain!

 

[supergper]

Same would also be true if you were using Exchange due to Outlook Web Access.
Note: I'm not advocating Exchange. We use it here where I work and I can't stand it. The server is a pain in the ass to support an maintain, something you should definitely factor into your cost analysis as well. If I were going to run anything new in house these days, I'd probably go with Zimbra.

Zimbra doesn't scale real well. I have Zimbra deployed at one of my sites and it hasn't been the best of experiences. I'm switching them to Exchange (and I HATE Exchange but it does work).

EDIT: I want to make it clear too that I am a Linux/Unix admin, not a Windows admin. I'm at home on the command line, not in some stupid gui.

 

[priteshvarsani]

for 100 or so users its fine really, i dont do the admin work for zimbra as thers another admin for that.

From what ive seen its been stable and very fast!

I suppose you do have to configure it perfectly to get it to work properly.

 

[Sasiki]

Thanks for the Zimba link. I could incorporate this into the VMware box I'm planning to use. I'll try it and see how it goes. With Zimba though, that'd be that much more to back up. With Google Apps, I don't have to back up. The only machine I'd have to worry about it is the application server. I was planning to put a 2nd box at a remote office about 30 miles away and back up over WAN.

I'll try it out anyway though. I have a dual xeon 2.4ghz box sitting here powered off.

 

[Grentz]

Google Apps is great for home office/small biz, possibly medium-sized businesses. It's a freaking nightmare using GMail if you have 1000's of emails in your inbox. Their 'labels' idea is a total joke. I prefer folders.

Thats personal preference, I know quite a lot of people, myself included, that really like the labels setup.

and if you access via IMAP, the labels are indeed "folders". It is a bit different and things are done a tad differently than your typical 90s email setup. But it works well when you learn it.

 

[shade91]

Google apps does sync with blackberry's according to this

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/mobile.html

I didn't really read through it nor do I use it so YMMV

Inbox only. Calendar, contacts, notes, etc etc don't.

If I go the Google Apps route, most users will still likely still use Outlook for retrieving messages, but on a positive note, all messages will still be on Gmail for them to read if they are away from the office.

You'll be out the cash for MS Office. If you take MS Outlook out of the picture, why not OpenOffice to take it one step further?

My boss wouldnt accept the use of anything opensource a few years ago! Its advanced so much now though, i have to be honest im glad were bringin linux in now, its so much more simple once u get over the task of navigating the DAUNTING command shell.

We have too many industry-specific Windows apps that could never run on Linux (don't tell me Wine, or whatever else). The only servers that I could go open-source on were our Web and Monitoring servers.

Thats personal preference, I know quite a lot of people, myself included, that really like the labels setup.

and if you access via IMAP, the labels are indeed "folders". It is a bit different and things are done a tad differently than your typical 90s email setup. But it works well when you learn it.

It is personal preference. Let me get back to you in a couple of years when I actually find someone (non-nerd) who still uses IMAP to access their email on their PC (and don't tell me your grandma or your next-door buddy is using it on Thunderbird). I'd lose all my corporate clients if I subjected them to that garbage.

EDIT: I love this new multi-quote option.

 

[marley1]

zimbra sucks balls. maybe the new edition with blackberry suport will be decent. a few of our realestate offices are using it through one of the providers, it isn't the best service. but could be due to there setup.

 

[niccoli]

We looked at Exchange, Zimbra and Google Apps when we were evaluating. Exchange 2008 is a beast and the exchange vs zimbra glossy's that microsoft had sold zimbra for us. Zimbra was nice but their pricing was weird and no systems engineer that I talked to could give me a straight answer on what we needed. Google Apps also provides more than just email with chat, start page, web page, calendar, google sites and message security/discovery by postini and 25 Gig's of email storage

Google apps definitely has it's short falls, if you already have exchange I wouldn't expect you to switch to GA. GA has been great for us, users are slowly moving from outlook to the GA email via the web, in the next few weeks our sharepoint server is going away as google docs has been a much better fit for us (we primarily share excel & word docs. Overall google apps saves me 2 hosted servers a month...a savings of right around $200 a month. They offer a 30 day free trial for the premium, google apps premium also offers email routing so you can keep your email server running while you try google premium. We ended up trying google premium for 60 days before finalizing on a decision.

One downside has been the support, while we have not ran into any issues if it is a non-system critical issue it's email only support and takes between 12 and 48 hours to get a response back. For a paid service I find this horrible, however, with no major issues thus far we've coped.

We're also an ISP and have been looking at migrating our email accounts to google apps for service providers. Test groups thus far have been very positive, especially since you can keep receiving just as you can now via POP3/SMTP if you want and it makes my costs for email go WAY down, most of our customers have in-house email. Res side is getting way too expensive to stay ahead of spam/viruses vs just moving them to google and letting google deal with it.

 

[Sasiki]

The company has a couple subsidiary's with different e-mail domains. If I'm reading the documentation correctly, I can set up aliases under the main domain so these other folks can use it as well, right? Ex. Main company is company1.com, but subsidiary's use company2.com and company3.com. I can set up company2 and company3.com under the company1.com Google Apps account so I don't have to open up 3 google apps accounts.

 

[joblo37pam]

Does your business plan on expanding? If you won't be going over 75 users in the life span of this server, maybe you should look into SBS. Licenses would run about $5000 and you would have exchange. Definitely a cheaper option and you would have all of the functionality of Exchange, plus Sharepoint, and if you go with SBS Premium, a full SQL license. Definitely worth looking into if you are going to stay under 75 users.

 

[priteshvarsani]

5000 dollars is a lot of money, and with google apps all the management is done for you, it really all depends on whether you want ! Ive always found SBS too bloated, and theres no point on having one exchange server, there is no redundancy at all! What happens if a power surge knocks out all sevrer in you site, your pretty screwed, or if you internet connection messes up, you get some lost emails. If you go hosted, you are not at risk of any of these problems (unless the internet for the whole world goes down which is pretty unlikely!)

It all depends on if you need the MAPI features of exchange, and active directory!

 

[supergper]

The company has a couple subsidiary's with different e-mail domains. If I'm reading the documentation correctly, I can set up aliases under the main domain so these other folks can use it as well, right? Ex. Main company is company1.com, but subsidiary's use company2.com and company3.com. I can set up company2 and company3.com under the company1.com Google Apps account so I don't have to open up 3 google apps accounts.

yes, that is correct.

 

[Sasiki]

We are on a workgroup environment and active directory is not a necessity at the company. I'll at least give Google Apps the benefit of the doubt and do a 30 day trial run with it, but have it redirect all mail to my current server (which will be decommissioned in August).

 

[priteshvarsani]

U can double up google apps with a local server as well you know, just mess about with ur MX settings.

To run exchange you need active directory, which would be useless if you plan to stay in workgroup.

 

[priteshvarsani]

Also last time i checked google apps is free for under 100 users, am i correct ?

 

[Sasiki]

Also last time i checked google apps is free for under 100 users, am i correct ?

You are correct. However, on the free version, you lose some functionality such as Postini, guaranteed uptime, dual delivery controls, amount of e-mail storage, etc.

I have a free account open right now using a domain that the former sys admin had registered some time ago and paid for like 7 years in advance. I figured i'd put it to good use and test around with it.

 

[joblo37pam]

5000 dollars is a lot of money, and with google apps all the management is done for you, it really all depends on whether you want ! Ive always found SBS too bloated, and theres no point on having one exchange server, there is no redundancy at all! What happens if a power surge knocks out all sevrer in you site, your pretty screwed, or if you internet connection messes up, you get some lost emails. If you go hosted, you are not at risk of any of these problems (unless the internet for the whole world goes down which is pretty unlikely!)

It all depends on if you need the MAPI features of exchange, and active directory!

The OP said that they were willing to pay the $3000/year for GA. $5000 would be a one time fee for SBS. SBS can be bloated, but offers great functionality for the uses it was designded for. The revelation a workgroup makes that whole idea moot, though.

 

[Grentz]

I dont know any true large company that would entrust their crucial data to a third party like Google (aka thinking that they will do it all for you). It is still necessary to have personal backups IMO and not good practice to just hope that google will keep everything running perfectly and safe (even though their track record so far is great, and I have been very happy with their service, crucial data is crucial data).

It is personal preference. Let me get back to you in a couple of years when I actually find someone (non-nerd) who still uses IMAP to access their email on their PC (and don't tell me your grandma or your next-door buddy is using it on Thunderbird). I'd lose all my corporate clients if I subjected them to that garbage.

EDIT: I love this new multi-quote option.

I said you can use IMAP, personally I dont use IMAP. I access my apps account through a web browser and mobile browser. I just have a window open all day with my mail in it.

Also IMAP is still widely used in a lot of companies, I know quite a few large ones that use it very successfully with linux mail servers. IMAP itself is old, and needs to be updated as a standard IMO, but to say no one uses it is stupid since a lot of companies out there utilize it and it is leaps and bounds better than POP3 for centralized mail management.

Someone needs to come out with something like IMAP 2.0 though, fix a lot of the issues with IMAP and it could be very nice for people to use.