Email Alternative We Give An A+

Had someone suggested even a few months ago that I would be writing this post, I would have said they were crazy and recommended a thorough mental evaluation. That was back during the days when a product not produced by Microsoft was unheard of in our repetoire of products.

JFSI has from day one run Microsoft Small Business Server and Microsoft Exchange. We liked it so much that we never even considered alternatives; and many of our clients are prety much in the same boat.

Don't get me wrong -- Exchange is a great product. For medium to large sized companies it still has no equal.

A few months ago, a friend and I were talking about the concepts of "Software as a Service (SaaS)". You've undoubtedly heard about it and the whole idea behind "cloud computing".

During this conversation, my friend mentioned that they were evaluating Google's suite of applications called "Google Apps".

The conversation intrigued me to the point where I started doing some research; and that research led me to beta test the product in our environment. To make this long story endless, we liked what we saw so much that we dumped Exchange for Google Apps.

You ask -- WHY?

• We were initally concerned that Google Apps' email was nothing more than GMail. While it has a lot of the characteristics of GMail, it's different; it's secure; it's reliable; it's fast; it's avaialble from any computer with an Internect connection and I like it better than Outlook Web Access (OWA).
• JFSI is in business to support small to medium sized companies -- not medium to large to mega sized ones. An Exchange environment can be very expensive.
• We were initally concerned that we'd lose the ability to access our mail through our much loved, tried and true Outlook client; but that concern was short lived because Outlook works fine with the applications
• We LOVE the fact that multiple users can simultaneously work on the same document, see changes each user makes and know that the application is doing document versioning and keeping track of who does what
• We LOVE the fact that the applications seamlessly synch with our Blackberrys through the air, eliminating the need to tether them to a PC in the office or spend the money to install Blackberry Enterprise Server software
• We LOVE the price -- $50.00 per user per year for a 25GB storage space
• During the last month, we've caught one message in our spam folder that should have been in our Inbox
• While we have not done a lot with it yet, the Intranet services included in the applications seems to rival those provided by SharePoint Services.

Send me an email or give me a call if you'd like more information about our experiences.