does anybody have any experience with google apps premier edition? it's basically gmail for businesses & you use your own domain name. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

we're considering switching from exchange b/c it sucks hard and our project manager/IT dept guy is constantly having to fix something with it. we have an unverified security certificate and no actual email server name (just a bunch of numbers which do not work when you try to set it up on a cell phone). ghey

anyway...

7/7/2009 12:10:13 PM

i have experience with Google Apps standard edition (free) up to 200 users, love it.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

i've used it for 3 other non-profits as well.

[Edited on July 7, 2009 at 12:50 PM. Reason : .]

7/7/2009 12:50:24 PM

I too have setup the standard edition and ^ I think non-profits get a free Education (read: premier) edition, correct?

7/7/2009 1:05:42 PM

your IT department sucks balls. they're the problem.

fire them and move to gmail if they're having that many problems.

7/7/2009 1:05:55 PM

hahah our IT department is one guy, and i'm his backup. it is not a fulltime thing for either of us nor is it why we were hired. we're a close knit office of 11 people and we've been kinda scraping by with our email setup for forever. i'm sick of there almost always being a problem and either david doesn't know how to fix it, doesn't have time to fix it, or he isn't here to fix it. it really shouldn't all be put on him anyway. he has wayyyy to many other things to do that make us money.

can we use the free edition?

the migration from our ghetto jerry-rigged exchange setup needs to be seamless. this probably isn't possible since our system always fucks up some way or another, but as close to painless as possible would be great.

[Edited on July 7, 2009 at 1:25 PM. Reason : ]

7/7/2009 1:24:01 PM

Everyone in this office had a different yahoo, hotmail, or personal ISP email they were using.

The free version is up to 50 users and briefly scanning the TOS I didn't see anything that would land me in jail for using it.

I have it setup on one of my personal domains if you want to check out the interface with a mock-admin account.

[Edited on July 7, 2009 at 1:31 PM. Reason : .]

7/7/2009 1:31:11 PM

if you "request more user accounts" they automatically bump you up to 200 users for free (for the standard edition)

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain.com/RequestMoreUsers

[Edited on July 7, 2009 at 4:34 PM. Reason : .]

7/7/2009 4:33:13 PM

I don't think that works for standard.

7/7/2009 6:27:21 PM

yea, it does, i have standard and 200 free users

7/7/2009 7:04:55 PM

jesus



exchange is not hard.

7/7/2009 7:35:05 PM

Yea...it really isn't that hard.

7/7/2009 8:01:26 PM

agreed. i haven't managed to fuck it up yet.. been running for a few months later with no issues.

sounds like you guys need to spend $500 on a getting a consultant there for a few hours to fix the blatant fuck ups

7/7/2009 9:35:39 PM

It's a mess. I've tried. I'm glad David is out this week so it gives me a chance to possibly make some changes. Dad is fed up. Everything always goes horribly wrong once David leaves.

7/7/2009 10:32:20 PM

^srsly?

7/7/2009 11:14:21 PM

I can hook up exchange at a good rate, assuming it's a recent version and you're in the raleigh area. If you don't need local copies of everyone's mail, gmail domain is hard to beat though.

7/7/2009 11:14:29 PM

Quote :

"your IT department sucks balls. they're the problem."

didn't read the thread

if they fucked up exchange that badly, they will find a way to fuck up anything else you switch to

7/7/2009 11:24:41 PM

1. Exchange is not hard.

2. If it is too hard, there are hosted Exchange solutions like http://thoughtbus.com that can handle all the setup and backend and then provide you with the exact same Outlook experience that your employees are used to for a pretty cheap price.

3. For a corporate environment, I'd move to the Google Apps solution last.

7/8/2009 8:50:53 AM

i don't know anything about exchange. i probably could learn but i'm not sure exactly how to even get to the admin part of it. i've never had to and never been shown.

we're not in the raleigh area.

we've got a guy here right now working on it. somebody who knows what they're doing, supposedly. *crosses fingers*

7/8/2009 8:58:24 AM

+1 for the hosted exchange route. For a smallish company it makes good sense.

http://www.appriver.com/exchange/default.asp

$12.95/month/user for unlimited mailbox size.

7/8/2009 9:00:53 AM

$13/user/month can get expensive fast. you really just need someone that knows what they're doing to get in there and set shit up right. spend the $500 to hire smoothcrim or whatever he charges now so you quit having to deal with it.

google apps isn't a bad idea either though really.. and it's certainly not worse than the current situation.

7/8/2009 9:38:26 AM

if you pay for google, you can have local copies hosted. the maintenance is similar to exchange though, so you'd be back to square 1

7/8/2009 11:07:32 AM

Quote :

"yea, it does, i have standard and 200 free users"

Well, I tried it on both of my standard domains and it didn't work.

7/8/2009 4:30:38 PM

okay...

certified microsoft dude comes in today to work on our exchange server. fixes somethings including the certificate. the iphones & a motorola q are still not able to connect. he says everything is now set up right on our end. we do have a problem with a gateway but we've temporarily switched until we get it fixed (i have no idea what that's about).

we routed the bosses' emails through plain ole google accounts then to the phone for temporary (with them replying to emails as their exchange addresses). the guy says we WILL get it fixed. i'm thinking if we've already spent ALL DAY on this and it's not working, let's just stick with google since that took all of 10 minutes to set up.

i don't know. i learned a LOT today but i still don't know what's going on.

7/8/2009 4:44:00 PM

not to steal the thread but I was wondering about the Google Standard edition. Small company with about 15 email addresses on a hosted pop3 type account, I'm the tech guy and I know shit about email. I want to move at least some of our addresses to gmail. What's the difference between the standard edition apps & just having gmail check our existing pop3? For the tech retarded (seriously, I wonder how some of them function on a daily basis), can you integrate it back into Outlook (07 & 03)? Does it not work with the Google Offline (someone mentioned not having copies stored locally)?

Thanks for the help & sorry for the hijack

7/9/2009 9:24:44 PM

if you use google apps (free or premier) it functions almost exactly like a remote exchange server with gmail as the web front end. you can have it work with outlook, work with your phone, check it on a website (gmail.com), etc etc.

7/10/2009 10:06:00 AM

^what he said.

7/10/2009 12:13:30 PM

anybody else getting a server error from Gmail at the moment?

7/23/2009 1:58:24 PM

nope

http://www.google.com/appsstatus says all good too

7/23/2009 2:01:18 PM

there for like 30 min i couldn't get into gmail

it gave me an error 500 (server error) but I could surf the web just fine

i dunno

7/23/2009 3:02:55 PM