Oftentimes costs are a major driving factor in decisions to move to different enterprise solutions. According to an article by Jonathan McCormick and Daniel Riley for Network World, businesses are actively searching to find more manageable and cost effective e-mail services.

Their article debate highlights the features of Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Exchange. McCormick, chief operating officer at Intermedia and an advocate for Microsoft Exchange, pointed out his reason why the platform was the best out of the two. His list of explanations included:

·        Ease of migrating existing e-mail data, users, contacts, and more.

·        Certified 24 hr. support for the tools (Blackberry & Microsoft software)

·        Business-class reliability

·        Control over the environment

Meanwhile, Riley, Vice President of Services at Isos Technology acknowledges the criticisms around the Gmail platform and provides his list of supporting points for Gmail which included:

·        Gmail and its apps platform costs less on a per user basis.

·        Innovation factor- more than 40 new features were added last year.

·        Support is available for critical issues and escalation needs through a support call line, large online community of users, and apps that offer direct channels for support.

·        Claim that lack of support for mobile devices is quickly diminishing.

Click here to read “Tech debate: Google Gmail vs. hosted Microsoft Exchange” in its entirety.

In a recent IMF connect, a member discussed their organization’s migration from Microsoft to a web mail solution.

*Company name has been removed for privacy.

Company A Background:

Company A has 8,000 Domestic Users with various chapters that utilize Google or Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS.) The enterprise is structured in chapters similar to a franchise. Some of these chapters use Google’s platform and others use BPOS- which is a web solution that easily integrates with outlook exchange locally.

Key drivers for transition included:

1. Cost Saving and
2. Scalability (platform that will take all systems in to one environment)

Transition Approach:

The transition is currently being implemented and will be completed through a segmented approach (i.e. chunks, tiers). Both Google and BPOS provided for self transition solutions.

• Google has a self transition/migration tool for outlook that allowed the user to migrate the files (PST’s)
• Dual Solution: Google and Outlook. but eventually folks just stopped using outlook since it was too confusing
• Training: Web based and very self directed – it brought mixed results as some folks needed more hand holding

PST Files

• There has been implementation of a “purge rule” which means that all mail cannot be kept for longer than 12 months.
• Google allows for 25 Gigs per user (pooled)

Major Challenges that Company A faced included:

• Lack of confidence in the new tool
• Fear of Security “in the cloud”

To address the challenge of confidence in the new tool, Six to eight months prior to migration there was communication centered around the tools, its benefits, trends (i.e. where the next generation will be: the cloud) and why a migration was going to be implemented. To address the fear of security “in the cloud,” an “evangelist” of the transition in the field was created and the vendors were leveraged to engage with other users. There was also communication about successes experienced in other companies.

According to Company A “The best thing that we did was having the business own the project People on the project team were from the business.”

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