Exchange vs Cloud and why SMB should care.

Back again, been a long time since I had anything useful to share but having recently done yet another Exchange to Google Apps migration I thought I should update people as to just how easy this process has become.

I have inherited a client with 10 users they have an exchange server running Windows Server 2003, it's unreliable crashes constantly and basically causes havoc with the users. Its the gateway and manages DNS and DHCP so if it goes down, internet, email, file sharing stop. The business grinds to a halt and people get upset as they cannot do anything at this stage.

They were sitting on the option to upgrade everything (the server was quite old) which would mean, new server estimated around $4000 new licenses for the server and the cal's for the other computers on the network. Not to mention the setup and ongoing maintenance. A cloud solution with Google Apps is a fraction of that cost. Before I got involved they were going to head down this road but after I met with my new client I explained the cloud and how cost beneficial it can be (not just in the initial setup but the ongoing cost's as little to no maintenance is required).

People love what they are used to Google allows a user to stay in this world.

Keen to go ahead the only concern was that the change might interrupt the current obsession that most of the staff have with outlook. Google to the rescue, they have thought of this and have the almost perfect solution Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. My client was not convinced everything will look the same as it does currently, so I showed them on my laptop I linked to my Google Apps account and all was proven. The only thing that was missing was the lack of public folders my client was using public folders for a sort of global contact list but I found a solution for that too by using Apptivo Contacts Sharing for free they were able to sync all their existing contacts and this would then sync across to all users.

So my client went ahead with the solution, migration was smooth, only thing is it takes a long long time to upload the content onto Google's servers, I used the Google Apps Migration Tool for exchange on the server. Now my client doesn't have to worry about the exchange server going down and disrupting his whole workplace. The issue now is making sure the internet connection is 100% stable and maybe even setting up a backup.

I could see how this can be a massive headache migrating a larger user set to the cloud in this manner, but for  an small to medium business without internal IT support this just makes so much more sense then having a self hosted mail solution.