Pondering: Google Apps or Exchange

Jason Powell, a friend of mine, wrote about a new wiki that he and a few other Church IT professionals have just begun. Below is the blog post describing what they are trying to do:

Switch from Exchange to Google Apps? Join the discussion on citrt.org

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.

We have also been thinking about making the switch from Exchange to Google Apps. If you have experience in making the switch, both good or bad, would you please share what you know and have learned. You can access the wiki here: Google Apps, Pros-Cons-Others