IT / Web

This post is a long time in the making, but a recent article from Google renewed my passion for the topic, so I thought I would share our journey into the clouds with you.

Step back with me, way back to 2002, when I began my employment here at North Point. At that time all of our email was handled through a Mac clone running EIMS. People only used POP on this bad boy, so all email was contained within the individual Entourage databases of our users. If this doesn’t strike fear in your heart, then you might be reading the wrong blog.  On top of this, there was no real contact or calendar sharing to speak of.  And to make matters even worse, we were (and still are) an all-Mac shop on the end user side. So to move to something like exchange was a very difficult idea for us to swallow.

We went on like this for the next 4 years until…one day…. we hired…a windows guy to run our IT department….

dum dum dum…..

Fear not though… we quickly assimilated him into our undying devotion to the Apple platform. This turned out to be great because he had the best of both worlds. He had the experience of the real world, and the love of the pretty one. So, we began our search for a replacement of EIMS.

Fast forward a few years to the end of 2007 when a friend of mine asked an alarmingly simple question, “Why don’t you guys use Google Apps? Its free?” What?!? I did a double take to make sure he was serious. After I casually blew him off, I quickly ran back to my desk to ponder the idea. Eventually, we set up a test domain, added some key users in the ministry, and quickly fell in love. Here’s why:

1. It democratizes technology: people only use what they need of Google apps. They don’t have to wait on the IT department for upgrades and feature additions.
2. They have more cash than me: they can provide backups and D/R sites that I will never be able to afford.
3. No infrastructure required: need I say more?
   
4. Its free: as in the First Amendment.
5. Spam filtering: it’s by Postini/Google, and it is awesome and crazy cheap for NPO’s. This also provides us with 1 year of email archiving.

There are many other reasons but these are the big five as I see them.

Over the next year or so, we migrated all of our users from Entourage POP to Mail.app/gmail/imap. We migrated all of their calendars to Google and provided training sessions of about 10-15 people per session until everyone was migrated.

As with any major move, we had many challenges.

• Google has not been the greatest customer service organization. Getting in touch with someone when a real issue arises has its problems.
• We are one big organization with many parts (campuses, and domain names), and Google apps only gives you one domain for everything to fall under. However, they also allow you to have alias domains. So, we created a parent domain to configure everything, and we set everyone’s default alias/domain to the campus/domain where they work.
• We had to develop our own training materials and migration plans. I only mention this because since then Google has created a deployment center for this. I highly recommend it.

The move to Google apps has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for us. As Google continues to shore up current features and add awesome new ones, it only gets better. The only problem we are having these days is how to get all this new information into the hands of the users that want/need it. Despite everything though, I would much rather have this problem than sending emails to my users about my exchange server being down.

Disclaimer: We were a bit unique with our move in that we went from nothing to something amazing. Most people already have Exchange, so moving to  Google apps may be a little more difficult for them because it may not solve all problems. Furthermore, your users already have certain expectations of a product that mine did not. Here is a great source of information on this point. http://citrt.pbworks.com/Google-Apps-Pros-Cons-Other