Email has come a long way in the last 24 months or so. A big step forward came with Google’s introduction of Google Apps, which allowed you to use your own domain name with a GMail account. This meant that you were no longer stuck giving out an unprofessional sounding [email protected] address at interviews, when you could quite easily give out [email protected]. It all depends on how good you are at getting the domain name of your choice. Google Apps is also free. This is of course a big selling point (ironically) and unlike many of the free-for-personal-use gotchas of the online services world, Google is quite happy for you to use this for business. Quite a few of my clients are set up this way.
However it is easy to get a bit carried away. I had the displeasure of discussing email solutions with an odious little character not so long ago (we’ll call him The Accountant). A client is currently paying a lot of money to host their email on a hosted Microsoft Exchange server, and this character was brought in from the echelons of upper management to scrutinise the use of money in all areas of my client’s organisation. Being an educational institution, cost is of great concern to them. Nevertheless, they appreciate the importance of reliable, fully-featured online services and make good use of the features offered by Exchange. The Accountant decided that it was high time to stop the waste and move all of their email accounts to Google Apps.
This in itself is not a bad idea. Google offers educational institutions a great deal more than they offer the standard Google Apps user (which is already a lot). Again, this is all free. I would be all for the idea, had this client not already been using Exchange for several years. Google has worked hard to eat into the Exchange market and they have succeeded in taking a good chunk out of Microsoft’s dominance, especially in the small-business arena. However to say that Google Apps is for everyone is a bit misguided.
In the first place, Google offers Google Apps Sync, which is designed to connect Outlook to your Google Apps account in the same way that it would connect to an Exchange account; your email, calendar and contact data would all come in as if they were hosted on an Exchange server. This was the argument that The Accountant put forward when I mentioned the heavy usage of Outlook in the client’s office. The simple fact is that Outlook is only half the story. Anyone who has an Exchange 2007 account and has used the Web Access component of it will be able to tell you that it is much easier to use when you have 5 minutes to check your mail, accept or decline meeting requests and look up your organisational contacts etc at an airport kiosk. Microsoft know all about the brainwaves of impatient executives.
In the second place, the cost argument comes into play in a very big way. The Accountant failed to consider the cost of migrating data from and Exchange server to Google Apps. Google makes it quite easy to do this when you’re already set up with Outlook and if you download an application that uploads your existing data to your new Google Apps account. Simple enough for one account, maybe even five (I have done this many times for many clients). The client we are talking about here has 75 mailboxes. Even if each one were 1 MB in size it would be a gutsy person who would have the patience to do all of that, and an even braver one to give a commitment that every single byte of data will be moved across without a hitch.
In the third place, I am not against moving this client off their heavy-billing Exchange system. It’s a lot of money that could be better spent on other things. Again, Microsoft have figured this out, and in their ever-underestimated sneakiness, have come up with an educational deal that rather blows Google’s offering out of the water. It’s called Live@Edu and offers educational institutions free use of what is essentially a hosted Exchange server. Each account has just under 10 GB of storage and they even throw in 25 GB of document storage per user. I have used this myself, and I know that the move from the current hosted Exchange environment to this new one (called Outlook Live) is going to be much less traumatic for any user of the existing system. Even moving data and accounts across is more easily done. It would be completely irresponsible of me to recommend Google Apps over this.
I think Microsoft has really hit the nail on the head here. They already have 3.5 million university students using Live@Edu, and these are the same people who are eventually going to go into the workplace and know exacty how to use Outlook and Exchange because they have been trained to use it throughout their university careers. Microsoft has also been very generous about what is included. For the life of me, I cannot see any area of Outlook Live that has been locked to down to give less functionality than my expensive Exchange 2007 account. In fact, Outlook Live is based on Exchange 2010, and therefore offers more than what I have for my corporate mail.
I have been watching this space very closely, with many of my clients needing more and more out of their email systems without paying inflated pre-GFC prices for email. When I next get the opportunity to bore your pants off, I’ll let you in on Microsoft’s next sneaky step to attend to that very matter in the world of corporate email. Google may be the big thing right now, but sometimes I wonder if they know who they’re dealing with.