Casey Schorr

It's been a week since we decided to switch our company, Printfection, from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. I'm ecstatic to report we couldn't be happier and wish we'd made this switch a long time ago.

The switch over happened last Saturday and took us about 10 hours of solid, hard work plus a few more hours of tweaking to get everything working right. We expect to save thousands of dollars per year so this should have a decent hard ROI. Most importantly, we expect everyone to have a much more enjoyable & productive experience with their e-mail (the Gmail search feature is absolutely amazing--  I can now search through 50,000+ e-mails in fractions of a second). This is important, as we live in our e-mail day-in, day-out.

Some surprises we came across during the migration (and how to fix them):

1. Don't use the downloadable Outlook > Google Apps migration tool! If you're on an exchange server none of the internal e-mail addresses within your domain transfer! This is a deal-breaker! The reason is Exchange keeps internal e-mail addresses (think co-workers) in the GAL and the migration tool does not have access to the GAL. Instead, follow the IMAP migration instructions. This is a really slick way to pull the mail directly off the Exchange server and put it into Google Apps. You can migrate every user at once, using nothing more than a web browser! Everything is handled server-side "in the cloud".
2. Setup all of your e-mail groups before flipping the switch (changing your MX records to point to Google). This will take longer than you think. There is no easy way to import groups from Hosted Exchange to Google Apps. We had to re-enter all of our groups (hundreds) manually. Furthermore, Google Apps has a limitation of one e-mail alias per group. In Exchange you can have one group with 10 e-mail aliases. In Google Apps there is a 1:1 relationship between a group and an e-mail alias. We had to re-work some of our groups due to this limitation.
3. Install Google Calendar Sync on each user's desktop to move their calendar to Google Apps. I couldn't find an easy way to accomplish this without visiting each user's PC and installing this little program. Once you do a sync you can uninstall the program.
4. Where's the tasks? Gmail Labs has a very rudimentary tasks feature, but for most users it won't have enough horsepower. We told everyone to try out Remember the Milk for now, until Gmail beefs up their tasks feature.
5. Make sure to arrive at the office on Monday before your employees! Give them a quick training session and explain how everything works. The great thing about Gmail is 75% of our employees use it for their personal e-mail so they already knew how to do everything!

My favorite Google Apps features, as compared to Exchange:

1. Gmail search: Hands-down, the single best feature of Google Apps. I migrated 50,000+ e-mails from Exchange to Google Apps, including all of my deleted items. I can search through them in less than a second and get relevant search results! This alone was worth the switch.
2. Gmail threaded conversations: Somehow Gmail knows what e-mails are replies and threads them into one conversation. This keeps your inbox very organized without any effort.
3. 25GB of Email storage: I never have to worry about deleting another e-mail ever again! This will ensure I always have my old e-mails for reference, forever! I can't tell you how many times I've tried to find an e-mail from years ago, only to realize Outlook had archived it off the Exchange server and/or I couldn't find it because Outlook's search is awful.
4. Google Chrome support: I have my Mail, Calendar, Docs, and Contacts setup as "application shortcuts" in Chrome. They look and run just like desktop apps, and Gmail is much faster than Outlook ever was!
5. Google calendar quick-create new appointment: I can type in "Meet w/ Steve 9am Tuesday" and it figures it out, creating the appointment at 9am on Tuesday with the subject "Meet w/ Steve". This is a real time-saver for folks like me who put everything in their calendar!
6. Google Chat Gmail Integration: Conversations are stored within Gmail, automatically, forever. We are heavy users of IM within the company, previously using Skype. We've switched all 1:1 conversations to Google Chat and it's great to have an archive of your IMs in your Gmail. You'd be surprised how much mission-critical data is conveyed over IM!

If you have the opportunity to switch your organization to Google Apps I highly recommend it. We were skeptical it wouldn't be worth the effort. Thankfully it was. Hard cost savings in the thousands plus everyone is much happier with our new, simpler solution for messaging & collaboration. If our company is any indication, Microsoft should be very worried about Google.