Microsoft Exchange to Google Gmail Business, Cloud

Just saw this article from eWeek about a large company moving to Google's Gmail from Microsoft Exchange.

It's interesting to read since I've just recently migrated 2 non profit organizations to Google's Business Gmail. One organization was using an online email service and the other was using an in-house Microsoft Exchange server on SBS2003.

(With the "new" economy) Money and budgets were exceedingly tight for both of the organizations, so it made sense to take a closer look at the non-profit offering from Google.

I can say that both migrations have been a success, although there are some unique issues with Outlook to deal with related to IMAP, some restrictions to labeling (folder) character limits from Google, education for staff about connection items and server timeout issues... BUT for the cost *which is $0* it's a no brainer. BUT (and this is a BIG BUT) for larger organizations using the collaborative features of Exchange, Blackberry integration with calendaring and contacts, Google Gmail for Biz at this point needs to be avoided.

It truly is a case-by-case, organization by organization, business by business basis at this point.

In any case, it is interesting to read about a large for profit company moving to Google.

*Oh and just to add to the list of realistic issues with Google: yesterday in Washington, DC for about 12 minutes in the afternoon, via Verizon DSL, there was a total outage to any Google sites including google.com, gmail.com, hosted gmail, blogger, youtube. It happened on multiple systems accessing the net on completely different networks. So, we'll wait to see how uptime continues... I wonder if it was a Verizon DSL issue or a Google DNS issue? Or what?