I've been pondering the switch from Exchange to Google Apps as GCC's corporate email solution for over a year. While there are a couple of obvious benefits to switching to GApps, my team's hesitation has been the overwhelming number of unknowns along with a number of features we know we'd loose. Getting answers to our unknowns has been a challenge ... and in talking with other church IT peers we all have similar questions.
For non-profits, Exchange really doesn't cost much, offers a ton of enterprise class features, and in our experience requires little day-to-day maintenance. However, we're not married to Exchange and if there are solid and compelling reasons to switch we would seriously consider it.
To that end a couple of us got together and started a wiki page on citrt.org listing all the questions/concerns we have about Google Apps as an Exchange replacement. http://citrt.pbwiki.com/Google-Apps-Pros-Cons-Other We've already had 29 updates to the wiki page and it's barely 24hrs old :-)
What about you? Do have Google Apps questions you'd like to have answered? A few of our church IT peers have made the switch already and we hope they'll help answer our questions (they better!). Better yet, do you know someone at Google that can weigh in? Regardless, please join in the discussion.
Here is my advice . . . it comes from a pastor's wife . . . when ask why she didn't date anyone else but her husband before she married him she said, "You don't have to eat a bad chocolate chip cookie to know what a good one taste like."
It sounds to me that is where you are at . . . you have a good cookie.
I'm an IT manager for a construction company in Tennessee and I can't imagine switching to a different messaging system.
I'll join in on the discussion at site you suggested and post my reasons there.
Posted by: Dean Cooper | April 07, 2009 at 06:02 PM