From Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps
by Volker Weber
From Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps A Google Apps migration is difficult, costly, time-consuming, and virtually unsupported by Google -- so why do it?
Comments
Ditto from Lotus Notes/Domino.
Mail to mail migrations never stack up. The question is where to migrate to in the transformation to the post-email world?
What do people have at home? According to the comment entries on vowe.net, that would be Google Mail, or Google Apps in that case.
Very simple:
If you can't stand the {insert-word-not-appropriate-in-corporate-use-for-your-partner-in-marriage} anymore it doesn't matter how expensive the divorce will be, you will go for it. Just compare earnings of divorce lawyers with marriage counselors. Keeping the love alive is a hard business that in times quite often is orthogonal to quarterly earning reports.
:-) stw
What a nice way of saying that nobody gives a shit about existing customers. :-)
Nobody gives a shit about existing low-earning licenses. Something new and shiny and expensive though...
Get social.. buy licenses.
Historically running the cost numbers for a mail to mail migration never made sense. The only way to justify that kind of move was to just dig in your heels and say that you hate where you are and really want to be wherever you are going and are willing to pay for the change. Google Apps does change that equation though. At $50 per user per year (and potentially less if you are a non-profit/edu/big company that can negotiate) and including functionality that equates to quickr/sharepoint and sametime/lync the savings add up very quickly. While the migration is never easy (good for me since if it was I'd be out of a job) you can actually make a cost argument if your choice is GApps. The other cloud offerings such as Lotus Live and Office 365 are more difficult to justify from a cost perspective in enterprise scale shops unless you are coming from the same platform, for SMB's the cloud will almost always make monetary sense.
I have a number of GApps migrations under my belt now and my experience from a user perspective is that the vast majority of users are really happy with the experience once migrated. You do give up a bunch of control and need to understand my favorte axiom from my daughter's preschool when handing out different flavors of treats: "You get what you get and you don't get upset" but you get used to that quickly.
