Some time around 2008 I made the decision to go with Google Apps, rather than to build my own Exchange Server. I never did an in depth cost comparison on both platforms but the obvious reasons on why I went with Google Apps could be found here on my old blog post on Multiply. But that post never talked about on why I thought going with Google Apps were a better route.
Here were some of my "snap" judgments against MS Exchange back then.
Licensing Cost for MS Server (2000 or better) and MS Exchange
The one thing I hate doing during our General Manager's meeting is to propose new technology and try to justify cost as simply as I could, so the general audience would understand and appreciate on what I have to offer. Google Apps Standard edition was free and all you need was an existing domain name to use it properly, which our company already had. So it was really a no brainier there.
Training and learning how to use both MS Server and MS Exchange
I wasn't really too keen into this, call me biased, but whatever. I was already maintaining Ubuntu servers at that time and already did a lot of reading and experimentation on how to get one running the way I wanted to. I didn't have the time and energy to grapple with something like this.
Maintaining another physical server that was also "Mission Critical" for operations
As mentioned previously, I already was maintaining 3 Ubuntu Servers, although their very low maintenance at their end, but at the onset that something does go wrong, I need to focus on getting them back on their feet ASAP. Having another server to worry about, especially that the whole company's email is riding on that server doesn't make me too comfortable about it. And at that time the IT department was maned by me alone, having to hire one more guy wasn't really a practical solution to the problem.
Disk space for the long term
What I quickly found out working as the IT manager for the company is that, server disk space will always be finite, whatever HDD size you put in. Since the company will constantly grow and will be adding employees, I need to anticipate this as well.
But the one thing that I was looking for and wasn't present on Google Apps standard edition was:
Email restrictions / monitoring
What I couldn't do in Google Apps standard edition was to restrict my users on what can or they can't email. I was aware that in MS Exchange, you had more administrative control over the email content of your users. I also wanted to have an Intranet email for our book keepers as they sometime have to communicate with people in operations. This wasn't also possible with Google Apps standard edition.
It is possible however, to have these controls in Google Apps Premiere edition. Premiere edition was the paid version of Google Apps. At $50 a year, per user I miraculously was able to convince the management to do the switch so we could have tighter control over our email and also had the added bonus of added disk space (20gb as compared to 7gb from standard edition). With their quick approval, I wasn't required to find another option and compare costs.
Now here is where I want to draw my line of comparison with Google Apps, in our local environment. Since I never had the experience on setting up an Exchange server, I asked some of my friends if I could visit their company's set up and ask the people administering the servers and I would like to get the following data for comparison:
- Licensing Cost (MS exchange and MS Server)
- Hardware cost and specs of the server
- Time to train on how to use
- Features of MS Exchange and MS Server
- Implementation time table
- Cost for Push email (Blackberry enterprise)
- Disaster recovery procedures
Hopefully in the coming weeks I would able to do so and might present some of my findings on one of my upcoming posts. If by any chance you're a MS Exchange admin, what aspects would you also like to see for comparison? Also, I would like to know your points also vs. Google Apps.
Although I don't think I'll switch to MS Exchange anytime soon since Google Apps has already proved to be reliable up to today and saved me a lot of work. I would just like to take the opportunity to run some figures by and hopefully further justify with going with Google Apps.
