Context: My company has 100 locations, 10 of which are company owned and the others are franchise stores. We are using a third party IT company to support our tech needs and we currently have all of our HQ team members in MS Exchange and our franchisee email accounts to a simple webmail platform. My 10 locations are all on this simple webmail system and it is the lowest of lows. In fact, its very similar if not the same squirell mail I had at NC State 3-4 years back.

I want to take my 10 locations (30 employees) and point their email addresses to googls apps and use the gmail interface for email, calendar, docs.

Our IT provider is less than thrilled since this would take biz away from them. They are telling me it would require a lot of custom work ($$) to get this done. I have a third party Cloud Sherpas that does a lot of google app migrations and they say they do this every day.

Seeking any input on splitting our @company.com email accounts. Big barrier is IT company saying it could effect franchisee emails (which I would not get approval to move forward and they know this), where Cloud SHerpas says its doable.

TWW has always had good tech insight here. I expect a few jabs as I'm not the IT guy, but know someone here will have valuable insight. Thanks in advance.

6/2/2010 6:20:57 PM

If you have an Exchange license, why don't you enable Outlook Web Access (ie, Exchange's webmail) for your non-HQ team members? This is actually the ideal situation unless you don't want to pay for them to have an Exchange user account.

Otherwise, moving 30 email addresses to a Google Apps account is easy and quick ... sorry to say, but your IT provider is blowing smoke up your ass.

6/2/2010 6:36:01 PM

If they're in the same domain you'd have to setup some routing to send specific addresses to google. But they're probably already doing it w/ that webmail thing. They wont do it because google mail costs money, cheapass linux webmail doesnt. Right now they aren't paying for these users to have Exchange cals so they probably wont pay for them to have google accounts.

6/2/2010 6:46:29 PM

Quote :

"why don't you enable Outlook Web Access"

Valid point of which we have considered. We have a big need/want to instant message, video teleconference, and co-edit documents as well. 95% of our document use is very vanilla where docs could handle what we need (we think). We also like the ability to connect google email to Outlook if users prefer and to have email on our handhelds without paying for BES license.

Our idea is to test 5 users before migrating all 30.

6/2/2010 6:49:06 PM

Quote :

"Right now they aren't paying for these users to have Exchange cals so they probably wont pay for them to have google accounts."

Another good point that I did not clarify. I would be paying incremental costs to host with google. Right now they are charging us $1 per month per user for the squirrel mail for ~400 users.

6/2/2010 6:51:12 PM

There's a difference between the standard and premier edition of google apps. To get outlook to function the exact same as with exchange, you'll have to pay the fifty bucks a year per email to get google apps sync up and running. I went through this change about a year ago.

6/2/2010 7:01:48 PM

^ you're exposing that I'm not the IT guy. Clarification, we ARE talking about google premier here.

How has your experience been since moving away from exchange?

6/2/2010 7:04:15 PM

Quote :

"Valid point of which we have considered. We have a big need/want to instant message, video teleconference, and co-edit documents as well. 95% of our document use is very vanilla where docs could handle what we need (we think). We also like the ability to connect google email to Outlook if users prefer and to have email on our handhelds without paying for BES license. Our idea is to test 5 users before migrating all 30. "

OWA + Communicator + SharePoint does all of this. OWA has instant messaging built in on the web (zero client software needed). Add sharepoint2010 to it and you can live edit documents on the web with Office Live!, or live edit them in Office, with multiple people working on the same documents at the same time.

I have no idea why you are trying to kludge gmail/gdocs into an Exchange system that is pretty darn easy to integrate all of the functionality you want with products you already have.

6/2/2010 7:12:37 PM

Quote :

"I have no idea why you are trying to kludge gmail/gdocs into an Exchange system that is pretty darn easy to integrate all of the functionality you want with products you already have."

Price of Sharepoint server mainly and the ability to take our IT company out of the equation when we need to add new users, etc. Also like the ability to use google apps on the road without the need for BES. Were also using Voip where VM go to our email and 25 GB of storage is more than out 1 GB that we pay for now. Were open to the solution you provided as well, but we want to try both out on a smaller scale to see which fits.

Also should make the point that only our HQ has exchange environment, not my 10 stores who only have squirrel mail and most were previously using gmail accounts prior to my arrival on scene and delivering uniform @company.com accounts.

6/2/2010 7:22:05 PM

you wont be able to take your IT company out of the picture when adding users. They will need to configure the forwarding for each user individually like they do with the current webmail system.

6/2/2010 7:23:45 PM

^But that is a trivial task.

6/2/2010 7:25:16 PM

^, ^^ good to know, thanks.

[Edited on June 2, 2010 at 7:26 PM. Reason : .]

6/2/2010 7:26:00 PM

I ran into some issues miqrating everyone over to gmail, but it was all manageable to correct. I can go into detail if you'd like. My main problem with gmail right now is that its sometimes unreliable. Occasionally well have customers in south aefrica our australia who tell us that our emails were bounced. They are then able to send it a few minutes later without a problem. It's scary to think we may be dropping an email every now and again.

Another thing i find funny is that sometimes the service goes down, but my personal gmail still works fine. I wish the premier edition was as reliable as my personal email through google. Also the premier edition doesn't get updates as fast as regular gmail, which is strange because I'm paying for the service.

6/2/2010 7:32:23 PM

Quote :

"I can go into detail if you'd like."

Major high level pain points / lessons learned would be great. Much appreciated.

6/2/2010 7:38:12 PM

Quote :

"Price of Sharepoint server"

SharePoint Server costs 63 dollars per user per year, versus Google's 50 dollars per user per year. You can get cloud hosted SharePoint and Exchange.

You can manage Active Directory on the cloud as well through the same hosted offering, which would allow all of your 10 locations to use the same active directory instead of kludging together different web offerings.

You can eliminate all of your third party IT support for the needs you're talking about in this thread.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/businessproductivity/products/pages/cloud-services.aspx

6/2/2010 7:52:32 PM

^ Google's web offerings can hardly called kludged together. MS Live offerings, on the other hand, barely hang together at all.

6/2/2010 7:56:48 PM

^I didn't say google's are kludged together. I said trying to get an exchange + active directory setup and integrate it with google's other offerings is kludgy.

And I completely disagree. I use Exchange+Communicator+Outlook+SharePoint+Office everyday at work, and I use Google's mail+apps quite often on my own.

Google's stuff works, no doubt. I still love gmail, love google apps. But it's not even in the same realm of productivity I get with the Office stack on top of Exchange and SharePoint.

Also, I hate SharePoint as a web portal. But I LOVE SharePoint for collaboration and document handling.

6/2/2010 8:16:19 PM

*shrug* I don't have the will to argue. My experience with Microsoft Live apps was w/ Live@EDU, and that stuff is straight up painful.

6/2/2010 8:26:58 PM

Live Apps aren't equal to Google Apps (at least today). Live (Office) Apps are currently really useful for previews and minor editing usage. Fortunately the integration with the ACTUAL Office suite is pretty phenomenal, so that largely doesn't matter much at all.

Google doesn't really have that option.

Google Apps >> Live Apps by themselves. Office+SharePoint >>>>>>>>>> Google Apps.

6/2/2010 8:38:53 PM

Quote :

"sorry to say, but your IT provider is blowing smoke up your ass."

^office/sharepoint vs. google apps isn't really a valid comparison considering one is a (very) thick client and the other... isn't.

6/2/2010 11:01:58 PM

He's just being himself. Let him have his moment.

6/2/2010 11:06:53 PM

don't get me wrong, i think Noen is a pretty awesome dude IRL

6/3/2010 12:54:42 AM

Things to consider: If you want Exchange to function exactly the same, you will need to use the Google Premier account. You can use Google Apps Sync to upload your current PST file into Gmail. After doing this, make sure to delete this Outlook profile completely from your computer and create a new profile using Google Apps Sync to download from Gmail. If you don't do this, you will have a conflicting battle between Gmail and your old pst file. The newest version of GAS allows you to view multiple calendars now, but when we started this wasn't possible.

6/3/2010 7:23:31 AM

Quote :

"^office/sharepoint vs. google apps isn't really a valid comparison considering one is a (very) thick client and the other... isn't."

Sure it is. Productivity suites from two companies. Google has one option (web client), Microsoft has one real option (thick client). You can argue till you're blue in the face about how you can't compare them, but the reality is that IS the comparison. And Google gets it's ass whooped in that comparison.

As I already said, if you compare web to web, Google wins. But that's a bit of an artificial comparison to make when some 95%+ of business PC's have Office already installed on them.

6/3/2010 12:12:54 PM

bump

10/11/2010 11:07:07 AM

Thanks for the bump ken but I think I have this figured out.

I'm dumping any actual web hosting because I don't do anything with my site anymore, but I still need to have emails come to that address. I think I managed to get Google Apps set up to send/receive on this account without needing dedicated hosting.

10/11/2010 11:30:11 AM

I am also interested in converting from hosted exchange to google apps premier. are there any major outlook features that are not compatible with the gmail frontend to be aware of? mainly interested in converting to increase mail storage space, increase speed (not sure if this would be faster than hosted exchange), reduce costs, no extra $ for BES. this is for a 4 user hosted exchange environment. any advice appreciated.

10/11/2010 9:01:48 PM