Office 365 and Google Apps for Corporate email

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Bobby Dazzler

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Currently considering whether to switch from Microsoft Exchange to hosted email in the cloud for a business with several thousand email users.

Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps are the two obvious choices. Whilst other parts of the package will be useful, especially storage, it's really the email element that I'm interested in initially.

Anyone looked into it before, or taken the plunge on a similar scale?

How did the business case stack up? How did Users react? How did you migrate from your old email service? Do Users miss anything from the old service?

I'd be interested to hear from an IT perspective or a User perspective.
 
Not on your scale, but I ran a SBS server for my business which was a general pain.

Switched to google apps. I've got the Outlook connector, but the google interface is so good I hardly ever use it.

Some of the features are very clever (I like the one that catches 'Find Attached' in the message and warns you if there is nothing attached.

The actual migration on my scale (only 2 users) was easy - so easy that I had no problems.
 
I have done this.... We just moved globally from local , albeit Lotus Notes , based email to the Office365 offering .... I run some of the tech for UK and Europe..

My advice , and will happily speak privately to you , would be that it's cheaper for you to run it yourself.... And the Office365 service falls over more than it should ;)
 
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I took part in trials from a user point of view for both MSO365 and Google Apps on both services availability was an issue which if you handle time critical documents like tenders and bids then these systems just cant cope yet. Speed is also an issue on 3G connections particularly on heavy content. There was also some problem with not being able to encrypt some documents securely. In the end we stuck with MS Exchange. The 3 things that killed our project were

1. Availability
2. Speed
3. Security

Hope that helps
 
I've migrated small firms from Exchange to Google Apps and that's fine unless you want to share contacts - still work in progress apparently.

Office 365 is also OK if you need "vanilla" email, only problem is the 72 hours it takes to DNS to propagate, not good if you need to move a larger company on to it. Means serious down time as a weekend is not long enough to get everything 100% working.

Best of both worlds is to go with a cloud partner who can deploy office 365/hosted Exchange as you can choose to manage the server or not and if they are UK based their DNS should propagate much faster (providing your emails are generally to/from/within EMEA)

Oh, less I forget - you might want to ensure the company you use is not American, if you are at all concerned about the Patriot Act ;)
 
I've looked at it before and it didn't seem to stack up (in our case with circa 2500 users). However I do use Google Apps myself.

At my last company, one of our sister companies (Netherlands and I think Belgium) moved over to Google Apps for Mail and Office Productivity. When I last looked into it, the pricing for Google Apps looked extremely attractive even if you only ever used the email! Office 365 wasn't as cost effective. For a greenfield site / startup this kind of service would be extremely compelling.

At my last company we moved our mail security to MS Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (similar to the security solution they use with Office 365). For email we migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 (in house, albeit via a Managed Outsource provider).

At the end of the day it depends upon what your business view is from a financial perspective (i.e. if subscription based services are more attractive).

Finally, if you were to choose Google, depending upon what sort of business you're in, some people may ask questions about the 'morality' of doing business with Google (in terms of their Tax position) - having said that I don't believe MS are much better in that aspect either ;)
 
I've looked at it before and it didn't seem to stack up (in our case with circa 2500 users). However I do use Google Apps myself.

At my last company, one of our sister companies (Netherlands and I think Belgium) moved over to Google Apps for Mail and Office Productivity. When I last looked into it, the pricing for Google Apps looked extremely attractive even if you only ever used the email! Office 365 wasn't as cost effective. For a greenfield site / startup this kind of service would be extremely compelling.

At my last company we moved our mail security to MS Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (similar to the security solution they use with Office 365). For email we migrated from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 (in house, albeit via a Managed Outsource provider).

At the end of the day it depends upon what your business view is from a financial perspective (i.e. if subscription based services are more attractive).

Finally, if you were to choose Google, depending upon what sort of business you're in, some people may ask questions about the 'morality' of doing business with Google (in terms of their Tax position) - having said that I don't believe MS are much better in that aspect either ;)

Yep unless you have expensive headcount to cut, the Business Case isn't there financially, especially with larger user counts.
 
The best alternative to in-house Exchange is Hosted Exchange on Private Virtual Server (VPS).

The next one down the list is Public Cloud i.e. Office365 or Google Apps.

Public Cloud works out much cheaper though it is less flexible - if your organisation has lots of users who need access to other users' mailboxes, sending email on behalf of other users, complex calendar sharing etc then you'll soon find out that both Office 365 and Google are limited in what they can offer. But for straightforward email and personal/shared storage this should be fine.

In either case the pain is in uploading existing PST files to the Cloud, especially the larger ones (2gb+). Google have a tool for this, but it is still fiddly and time consuming. Also, everything works much better if everyone has Office 2010 (PC) or Office 2011 (Mac). The reality is that most organizations have a multitude of different versions of Office and this can be an issue. At any rate Office365 requires Office 2007 or higher. On the plus side, Google now appoint technical assistant to help with migration when you purchase business account with them.
 

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