Choosing Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange

Iskandar Blogger 11:53 AM
Editor’s Note: We’re pleased to welcome guest blogger Bill Kelly, Chief Information Officer for Duralee, a fast-growing decorative fabrics company. With more than 25,000 SKUs, the company caters to interior designers throughout the world. Headquartered in Bay Shore, New York, Duralee has more than 400 employees and dozens of corporate and designer showrooms.

Duralee recently chose Google Apps as their email platform, and Kelly – who led this decision – will share his findings in a livewebcast, "Choosing Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange." Please join us for this event on Thursday, August 20, 2009, 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT.

When I joined Duralee as CIO in October 2007, I knew it was time to switch out our aging messaging infrastructure. With 400 employees – and growing fast – our existing infrastructure was buckling under the pressure. We were experiencing delays in email and spent too much time administering the server and dealing with crashes.

I had been a Microsoft Exchange user and administrator for more than 10 years, so I assumed we’d go with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook clients. Then I thought about our overtaxed IT staff of five, and what would be required from them to set up and run Exchange. We would need to purchase, configure, integrate, manage and maintain many hardware and software components. We would also have to worry about our 50 mobile users and managing client software for their devices, too. I was also thinking about the cost for all of the required hardware and software. It would be a significant investment.

Then we started looking at Google Apps. The move to a cloud computing model really made sense for us because we wouldn’t have to worry about mail servers, updates to the software, backups, softwarerollouts to desktops or mobile users, and constant maintenance. Google Apps’ features met our requirements and provided 50-85% in cost savings to maintaining our old system or moving to Microsoft Exchange – either on-premise or hosted. With Google Apps, we got a complete messaging solution with anti-spam protection, disaster recovery and a 99.9%uptime SLA built-in. We also got features for collaboration that came as an extra bonus to email – and we're now looking at different ways to use Google Sites and Google Docs to improve our collaboration, internally and with customers. But probably the feature that our employees love the most is chat, including video chat, which is fully integrated and included in the suite of apps.

 You can learn a bit more about our experience on this YouTube video:
Our migration didn't come without some hiccups. But we selected a few users who had personal Gmail accounts and we included one of the owners of the company in our pilot. He was a power MS-Outlook user and once we saw how easily he adapted to the new platform, we knew we were in good shape. Nearly everyone in the company uses the web interface; indeed many prefer it given the many innovations you get there that you don't get with local clients. And since we've rolled out Google Apps, we've gotten even more for our money than we originally signed up for.

I've been in the spot many of you are in now – making the tough decision on which technology platform to move to. Now that I'm on the other side, I'm happy to share my experiences with Google Apps with you. Please join me for a conversation about what I learned in choosing, and deploying Google Apps.

Choosing Google Apps over Microsoft Exchange
Thursday, August 20, 2009
 2:00 p.m. EDT / 11:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 p.m. GMT

– Bill Kelly, CIO, Duralee Fabrics

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps team
Find customer stories and product information on our resource sites for current users of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino.