Google Apps Premier

[softscoop]

Has anybody had any experience in using Google Apps Premier?

We're currently using a mix of POP3 and IMAP, and to be honest with 40 odd users, it's becoming a bit of a pain trying to manage backups. We also can't do anything like shared calendars etc.

I've been looking into hosted solutions, and Google Apps Premier seems to provide all of the features we need (25GB storage, Shared calendars, docs etc) for a fraction of the cost of exchange server, as well as (hopefully) none of the running headache in administrating it.

I ran their trial for 30 days on one of our lesser used domains, and it worked perfectly, however after reading a lot of online comments, I'm now not so sure.

A lot of people have reported problems in running the Apps Sync application, with it missing emails, not syncing etc. One thing I have noticed though is that most of these comments are from when Google first released this over a year ago. I can't really find any good or bad reviews from the last 6 months or so.

If anybody has any real world experience of it, good or bad, please let me know, as I'm struggling to find the info elsewhere.

 

[office politics]

i havent used google apps, but i do know MS started providing hosted services for cheap. The full suite is 10 per user per month. Only Exchange is 5 per user per month.

Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services and Software - BPOS

 

[softscoop]

Only problem is that even the basic exchange is almost double the cost of Google (£35/user/year)

 

[office politics]

apps premier shows as 50 per user per year for me. this would be 10 dollars more per year for hosted exchange.

also, consider the feature sets of the two systems and any re-training that would be necessary.

people may become frustrated if they know how to do something with a MS product but not a Google App.