Gmail or Exchange?

Spoke with Mark Wiseler (Google Enterprise, Ireland) to get a better understanding of Google Apps and what they might mean to NICVA going forward.

First things first, I put on my non-profit hat, however it was quickly tilted to the one side when he informed me that there are currently no discounts in Europe for non-profits (except on Postini which we'll get into later.)

A brief conversation followed on the comparison of the versions, Standard (or free) and Enterprise (or not free), you can view the feature comparison chart here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/editions.html

...and now onto Postini (or to put in plain English, Email security & archiving) come January 2009, Postini is being moved outside of Enterprise Edition to being offered as a seperate service (its been redevleoped/re-vamped in line with customer feedback), the archving service has the function to date back upto 10 years and is guaranteed under law or google's head rolls in the event of data loss etc.

Now for the most important part, how much is the bloody thing?
Surprisingly reasonable? Competitively priced? well, a bit of both...
Based on 50 users it's £1635.50 per year or to break it down.
£25 per user/per year for Google Enterprise
£7.65 per user/per year for Postini

Postini being discounted 66% due to our non-profit status (I kept my hat on).

So is it a viable option for NICVA? Well we've a major consideration before 'dumping' exchange and its called CRM! Can we integrate with CRM, if so how, how do we make the switch to hosted email as opposed to onsite? Lots of questions but Google Apps has come of age and is most certainly worth further investigation.