At AMX Software, our primary interest is in helping companies manage their email corpus more efficiently, and in such a way that controls risk and helps increase regulatory compliance. As such, we have some interest in the IT systems that organisations use in order to actually send and receive email communications.
Readers may care to note that we do not sell Google Apps or Microsoft Exchange, therefore this article is intended as an impartial look as to whether Google Apps is ready for use today as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook.
Groupware
Most commercial organisations in the UK use Microsoft Exchange as their “groupware” platform. Groupware is, in IT terms, a now ancient term first coming to prominence in the market in products like Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise. Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook was Microsoft’s answer foray into this space and it has proven very popular. From a modern perspective, groupware describes software that handles problems such as email communication, individual and shared calendaring, collaboration tools and so on.
Some five years ago, Google released a Web-based email platform called Gmail. In true Google style they worked to create buzz around this product by making it invite only . For a while, having an “@gmail.com” email address meant that you were in the “in crowd”.
In the past two or so years, Google has used the Gmail – now called Google Mail – platform as the foundation for what has become a very capable groupware platform called Google Apps. In the next sections, we’ll take a look at what it can do.
Functionality
One thing that is important to appreciate about Google Apps is that it is transparent to your customers and partners. Google expects you to configure the system using your own organisations domain name. Some people think with Google Apps that you have to have “@google.com” email addresses. Not so – you can continue to use any domain names that you already operate. Your customers will not know simply by looking at your email address that you use Google Apps.
The core of Google Apps is the Google Mail email application. This offers essentially what you would expect from any email application, thus I will not enumerate the features here.
There are two ways in which you can use email with Google Apps. Google offer a Web-based frontend that you can use to send and receive emails. This interface is, frankly, slightly strange and does take some getting used to. Google have their own take on how email should be used and the interface reflects this. Equally frankly, it is difficult to put down in works quite how it is different to regular email.
The other way that you can access your email is through Outlook. This provides the same interface for managing emails that you are used to using now through Exchange. This interface is directly supported by Outlook – there is nothing special that you need to do to or with Outlook in order to make this work.
The second most common functionality to use with Outlook/Exchange is calendaring, and indeed Google Apps does support calendaring. Much like how you can on Outlook/Exchange, you can create separate calendars for separate activities and shared calendars within your organisation. However, two things to note here. The calendar application in Google Apps is not as refined as the email application. It can feel a little clunky to use. Secondly, the integration with Outlook is not as refined. In fact, integration of multiple calendars, especially those that relate to resources is not worth trying to integrate in with Outlook. That said, the calendar does work and does the core things that you need – an individual calendar, sharing of calendars with a group and meeting scheduling and planning.
The contacts application is a straightforward, flat contacts list, exactly the same as it is in Outlook. In fact, it’s so straightforward there isn’t anything particularly “wow” to say about it. In truth, most people only require a basic contact list and access to a CRM system for shared contacts.
Something that is entirely missing from Google Apps is the idea of “public folders”. Public folders are hugely popular within the Outlook/Exchange community and create a shared area for storing emails. However, public folders are an interesting problem in that Microsoft have been trying to get rid of them for years and have been promising to deprecate the feature in successive versions of Exchange since 2003. Their argument is that Microsoft SharePoint should be used for storing information, not public folders. Therefore, any organisation considering a migration to Google Apps should note that this feature is missing and an alternative would need to be found.
Outlook/Exchange have a whole slew of smaller features that I have not mentioned here. Tasks are all but missing from Google Apps – although “task-esque” features do keep creeping into the platform. None of the “forms” features are available in Outlook/Exchange make its way in either, so again organisations still using forms need to consider an alternative on migration.
Pricing
It’s the price that makes Google Apps so attractive. There are two options. You can either pay nothing for it – their Standard edition is free for up to 50 users and 7GB of email space per use, or you can pay $50 per user per year for the Premier edition. Standard edition does not come with support. Premier edition does, although the arrangement is slightly odd. You can raise support cases with them over email, but you can only phone them if your system is actually down. In essence, the thing you are likely to panic about most you can phone up and talk to someone about, but anything else you should expect a one business day turnaround on queries.
Compared to Microsoft Exchange this is an absolute steal. You do not have to pay for servers, Exchange licenses or Outlook licences. You also do not need to pay for a remote access infrastructure to access the system, which you would typically do with an “on-premises” Exchange installation.
Security
When we started looking around this article, we asked the IT and business community for their views. Everyone, without exception, expressed concern about their emails being hosted outside of the organisation by a third-party.
This is an easy first reaction, but for me it doesn’t hold much water. My position on this is that Google has to be more secure than virtually any other commercial organisation on the planet. In the first instance, there is no way they could risk any form of major security breach of their systems – a security breach at Google where data was lost or compromised would be the equivalent of a bank losing a customer’s money. The loss of confidence would be catastrophic. In the second instance, Google has hundreds of engineers constantly testing and refining the security on their systems. In essence, Google Apps will be more secure than whatever system you are using right now.
The same argument follows for loss of data. Whilst Google are famously obscure about exactly how their systems work, what is known is that they replicate their data around the world. A catastrophic physical loss (flood, fire or other natural disaster) should be survivable as multiple copies of your data should exist.
You hear the same argument in the community with hosted Microsoft Exchange providers. Again, if you go with a reputable provider, they have too much to lose by not being secure.
BlackBerry Devices
Oddly, it is on the ubiquitous BlackBerry that the system shows the least level of maturity. BlackBerry was designed from the ground-up to work with Microsoft Exchange, so the integration is as close as it possibly can be. Moreover, Research in Motion have done such a superb job of creating a small set of applications that work well together and have given the application suite on the BlackBerry a real feeling of capability and maturity. You generally will not get the same feeling of “slickness” from a BlackBerry working with Google Apps as you would with Exchange.
In fact, I would suggest that if you had a large fleet of BlackBerry devices (anything more than several hundred), you will run into a management problem insofar as BlackBerry devices will automatically provision and update themselves – they are basically “zero touch” devices. If you move to Google Apps you would need to “muck around” with each device to set it up as the user wants it, plus then you would incur an ongoing management cost.
On the flipside, Google Apps will work with any device, not just BlackBerry, so if you have people who want Apple iPhone devices, or other forms of smartphone you can offer them a good, on-the-road groupware experience with little cash outlay, albeit with a good chunk of management time required.
Business Continuance
The big issue for me with using Google Apps is that you have very little control with regards to system uptime – if it fails, you just have to wait until it is made available to you. Public perception is that every few months the system tends to be down for a short while – may be a few hours. On the paid-for, Premium edition Google do over a 99.9% uptime service level agreement (SLA). This is probably, on paper, better than you in-house team offer. But, of course, with an in-house team there is some satisfaction that can be gained by managing to reach a helpdesk. Users of Google’s free (aka “Standard”) edition of Google Apps do not have that advantage, but as mentioned above Premium users can phone a helpdesk.
Availability is one reason why using Outlook with Google Apps makes sense. If you use Google’s Web interface, if the system is down you cannot access your emails at all. If you are using Outlook, Outlook’s local copy will be available even if Google is not.
I discussed above about Google storing multiple copies of your emails around the world for business continuance. Personally we would always recommend using an offsite archive. There are solutions available for a number of providers that will intercept emails entering and leaving the Google Apps system and archive them. (We have a paper available on our Web site called “Email Archiving and Email Filing, Why are Both Imporant?” that goes into this in more detail.)
Systems Administration
The easy answer on “systems administration” is that it is much simpler, much easier and will most likely cost you much less. Your IT department simply needs to define the users on the platform and provide an Internet connection such that users can access the system. There are no servers, no backup issues and (depending on if you allow users to keep using Outlook) no client configuration issues.
Of course, some companies use hosted Exchange solutions, of which there are many different providers available. Companies that use a hosted provider for Exchange get the same advantage as per Google Apps.
Topaz Filer
It wasn’t our intention with this paper to talk much about our product, Topaz Filer. Topaz Filer is an email filing system which is designed to take emails out of an email store, like Exchange or Google Apps, and put them in a location where they can be intelligently shared by the whole team. In fact, we don’t have much to say about Topaz Filer with regards to Google Apps – our application works with Google Apps, therefore it does not matter to the application whether you use Exchange or Google Apps.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have outlined the features of Google Apps that compare with those available to organisations that run Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook as their groupware feature. The email functionality, I believe, is as good as that offered by Outlook/Exchange. The calendar is good enough for general use, but the Outlook/Exchange version is better. The experience for BlackBerry users is better with Outlook/Exchange than Google Apps, and practically those managing large fleets of BlackBerry devices would struggle to support a Google Apps platform in as cost-effective a manner.
That said, Google Apps is massively cheaper and easier to manage than Outlook/Exchange and the actual on-the-ground user experience, and the experience for your customers and partners is entirely transparent. In my opinion, Google Apps offers a considerable competitive challenge to Microsoft in that for small organisations, such as those with less than 100 people, there are highly compelling reasons to choose Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange.
Thanks to Rob Ameerun of Legal IT Professionals (www.legalitprofessionals.com) for his help in gathering the community feedback that helped shaped this paper.
