Nedko

Google Apps is a service providing customized solution for your company using several of Google’s products. By using Google Apps for your domain you can take advantage of Google’s mail service (Gmail) as well as several web applications including Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk. Since Gmail now supports both POP and IMAP functionality it’s worth considering switching your in-house email solution to Google Apps and offload the need for hardware, software, administration and maintenance, backups etc. For those of you who are already thinking about it – keep reading.

After a couple of days researching what exactly Google Apps has to offer and countless hours of searching for feedback from people with first hand experience on the matter I decided to bite the bullet and pull the plug on my good ‘ol mail server. My main motivation was the fact that i can try it for free and even continue using it for free as long as my domain met certain criteria. On top of that Google provided me with scheduling and collaboration tools using a one-size-fits-all approch. At that point I had heard enough and was ready to get my hands dirty with Google Apps or at least as dirty as a keyboard, mouse and 2 hours of my free time will allow. But before I continue sharing my adventure I wanted to share some of the pros and cons of using Google Apps.

Pros:

Most apparently you get a nice, production grade Gmail email service with a 99.9% uptime promise, backups, security, spam filters, web inteface people are familiar with.

Cost. The cost of the implementation and the ROI is very low (50$ per user per account per user – that excludes aliases and lists) for the Premier edition and FREE for the Standard version. Compared to other combinations requiring some combination of software + hardware + support you get the most bang for your buck.

Ease of use. Needless to say nowadays it’s hard to find a person not familiar with Google’s Gmail and their slick and easy to use web interface. This makes the transition for any institution a breeze and the time spent in user training limited.

Ease of administration …administration? What’s that? No, but honestly adding users is a breeze as well as user aliases and list administration. Of course there is always more to be expected especially when it comes to granularity and the concept of groups but it is my belief that there is already somebody in cube scetching and coding that implementation.

Premium Edition FREE. If you satisfy certain requirements you can use Google Apps Premier absolutely free. Those include registered non-profits and educational institutions.

Built-in Security – Google uses secure connections and data redundancy. Through the use of protocols such as SSL and TLS you can make sure your data is protected. In certain situations this extra security can pose a problem with existing applications which make use of SMTP but don’t provide secure connection but there are possible workaronds.

Physical security – your data is stored on a server in a data center with top of the line protection from any natural events from floods and fire to earthquakes.

Calendar functionality by itself is a great feature which again most people use and are familiar with the interface from their personal accounts. The integration under the same umbrella comes handy and the Premier edition includes goodies like room and resource scheduling.

Great collaboration tools like document sharing, simultaneous editing, web publishing and chat. It’s hard to express in words the time savings and convenience when you see a combination of these tools in action – whether you have 20 people editing the same document or just want to send a message to somebody you have everything you need.

A free replacement for an Office suite. Although Google Docs was not created as a perfect replacement of applications like Microsoft Office in mind it provides most of the features most users are likely to use. Except the fact that Google really missed the memo on a presentation replacement application their solution focuses on collaboration, central data storage, and 24/7 availability.

More of the bonus features include: API, Single Sign-On solution, super easy email migration, support for email gateway

Cons:

Control. Well, of course by committing you have less control in the decision making process but you can try and then always switch to another solution

You get what you pay for. If you don’t have the Premier edition free support is to no avail. That means that you will have to spend time researching when problems arise and most likely end up paying when there is nothing you can do about the problems

Maturity. Be mindful that Google Apps is a project in progress and is not very mature. That means that it is incomplete and lacks certain functionality which you might expect.

Support …or the lack thereof is one important thing to mention. See, even if you use the premium edition and pay all the fees you can only get so much. Getting to talk to a real person is off limits and all the automated phone service refers you is help and forum URLs. Your only chance to get some personal attention is to use the ticketing system submit form and prey that your issue gets looked at pretty soon. Make sure you bookmark this page https://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=bugs&ctx=bugflow_register08 as it will be your only point of contact with the Gods of Email.

Executables. Watch out for executable files – Google will not let them in even if you try to trick it by archiving it. Although sending executables through email is not a good practice as well as coaching your users to open executable extensions this can be a little annoying.

CSS. Not that this is exactly a very big deal for most people and they might as well never notice it but Gmail’s web interface will strip headers and almost all CSS from an email sent as HTML. For udnerstandable reasons they don’t want layout hiccups but some users can find that a bit inconvenient.

Privacy is a major concern for any organization especially when it has to do with sensitive company data and intellectual property.

Regulatory compliance. Before I continue any further let me just say that if your organization requires regulatory compliance of any sort which is often the case with certain branches of government, healthcare, and the financial industry you can automatically forget about it – Google Apps does not comply with the storage, transfer, filtering, privacy and disaster recovery requirements for those sectors.

Ads. When using the web interface you might have to see a couple of advertisements. Unfortunately the free edition does not have the option to turn them off but after all there is no such thing as free lunch.

SMTP limit. If you really read the fineprint you will know …or you will find out later that Google’s SMTP service has a restriction to send only up to 500 emails per day for a particular account. While this is enough for the average Joe in your office it might pose a risk if you are using any automated email services and notification in your organization. Again the workaround is using a separate SMTP server as an email proxy.

Filed under:
Uncategorized by Nedko