Archive for category: General

Over the past several weeks, the Horizon team has received more questions about the comparison between MS Exchange and Google Apps as a communication and collaboration platform.

Here is a presentation that compares MS Exchange and Google Apps in terms of investment, management, and administration.

There are also many user features in Google Apps that our former Exchange/Outlook users really love. I will share some of these in upcoming posts.

Google recently announced that Valeo, an “independent industrial group fully focused on the design, production, and sale of components, integrated systems, and modules for cars and trucks,” is deploying Google Apps to all 30,000 employees.

Why does this matter?

Industry watchers like Dave Rosenberg see this deal as further validation that companies of all sizes trust Google and Cloud Computing. More important than the cost savings of 50% to 75% over in-house solutions, businesses and non-profits must trust the security, availability, and reliability of the solution.

Google Postini Services issued its quarterly Threat Advisory. Even with the dismantling of the McColo Botnet in 2008, the volume of spam is increasing at a daily rate of 1.2%. This compares with a daily increase rate of 1% during the same quarter last year.

If you have spam protection, why does this matter?

If you run in-house spam filtering using Barracuda, GFI, or other appliance or software solutions, the continued increase in spam is hurting your network and system performance. In-house solutions may keep spam out of your inbox, but they do not keep spam from consuming your Internet bandwidth. Many solutions also do not prevent your Email server from wasting resources processing spam messages.

Hosted, or cloud-based, solutions stop spam and viruses before they hurt Internet and email server performance.

Click here if you want to learn more …

One of the unique features of Google Apps has been the ability to turn an email into a Task, allowing you to track follow up and deadlines.

Google has taken Task integration much further with the integration of Tasks into Calendar.

From within Calendar, you can now create tasks with due dates, which will be visible on your daily calendar.

Click Here to learn how to get started and to see some cool screen shots.

Twinstrata, the company that sells Clarity AP (assessment and planning) software, conducted a comprehensive study of the costs and risks of Google Apps versus Microsoft Exchange. In his Storage Bits blog, Robin Harris provides a good summary of the results.

Robin’s summary explains the stark cost difference — 20x on capital equipment and 5x to 6x on a 3 year total cost of ownership (TCO). Some of the details warrant clarification.

First, the study narrowed the gap based on the risk of unplanned downtime. MS Exchange, however, requires downtime on a monthly basis (or expensive redundancy configurations), for system and operating system patches and updates. Planned downtime adds to the cost and should be counted when comparing availability given that Google is engineered for zero-downtime.

Second, Google is developing a robust and diverse channel to provide the implementation, migration, integration, and support services identified is lacking in the study. While purchasing through a reseller increases the cost over the direct Google pricing, the value of the services improves the quality, and therefore lowers the cost, of using Google.

While these considerations may change the equation slightly, the business case for Google Apps is valid for many small and mid-size businesses.