Hey Sian!

I'm Xand, and one of my clients (Americans for Informed Democracy) uses Google Apps as their primary mail solution. They have six users at present, and it's been working wonderfully for them; they have had no issues with spam filtering or restrictions as far as I'm aware of. They didn't use Exchange beforehand, so there were no migration issues- as far as I know, it's not too difficult to migrate your mail from Exchange to Gmail. There's a page about it here: http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Migrate-from-Exchange-and-Outlook-to-Gmail-and-Google-Mail

Also, the university where I graduated from recently migrated from Exchange to Google Apps with little difficulty- with a little elbow grease and finagling you would be able to do it just fine!

-Xand

Æþel Tech

http://www.aetheltech.net

Thanks Xand. Appreciate the feedback. Mind sharing the university you graduated that migrated to GAFYD? Splendid!

Sure thing, sorry- I graduated from Colgate University!

Thanks for sharing!

Sian:

My name is Trey Csar and I just started as the new president of the Jacksonville Public Education Fund. Prior to my arrival, JPEF used an Exchange server hosted by a separate organization (and didn't even have its own domain name).

Having migrated two other nonprofits to Google Apps over the years, I quickly began using GAFYD for JPEF as well. The setup is quite easy, and we were able to migrate my two users' old e-mail via the Google E-mail Uploader, directly from their desktops. (We have three users, plus a number of group aliases for different projects, etc.)

If you have a lot of users, I'd suggest using Google's built-in IMAP migration tool. It's slow, particularly if it's hitting a single Exchange server, but effective for larger numbers of users.

Beyond that, everything is working quite well. I've never had trouble with spam filtering -- in fact, my experience has been that we get substantially less spam than I have under Exchange systems.

My only issue is that I wish e-mail delegation (allowing our admin assistant to send e-mail on my behalf and to view my inbox) was available for Educational versions of Google Apps (the Educational version is what you get as a nonprofit; e-mail delegation is only available on Premier level right now).

If you have any more specific questions, please don't hesitate to reach out directly -- trey@jaxpef.org.

-- Trey

Thanks a million Trey for sharing. On the subject of spam filtering, and your comment " I've never had trouble with spam filtering -- in fact, my experience has been that we get substantially less spam than I have under Exchange systems." 

My bosses greatest concern is email that should be coming in but its not because of Google's advanced spam filters. 

How do you know that's not happening with your non-profits Trey? 

Thanks!

Hello Sian,

My name is Mike Stoltzfus - I'm the Technology Administrator at a K-12 school in Virginia.  We have approximately 240 users, including 66 faculty and staff - the rest are student accounts.  Our faculty and staff use Google Apps for email, but our students have accounts primarily to access Google Docs for collaborating on projects for course work.  We migrated from email hosted at our ISP accessed via POP3 - a very easy process with Google Apps' ability to import email and check an external account.  My predecessor had purchased Exchange Server licenses, but due to a lack of server hardware resources, and the complication of implementation due to other factors, I opted to go with Google Apps Education Edition for our hosted email solution.  I had managed an Exchange server in a previous job, and I can say now, having managed both, that I really like Google Apps!  We have begun using the shared calendar feature this year, and are having success with that feature as well.  I've been very happy with the new features that are continually added, including the recent addition of email retention rules and the ability to send from an aliased address.

The spam filter is another reason I chose Google Apps.  I have had multiple other personal addresses with the Free Edition of Google Apps, and have always been very impressed with the accuracy of the spam filter.  I educated our users on how to search the online Spam folder for possible false positives, but so far I have not heard any reports of false positives being a problem.  The accuracy of Google Apps' spam filter is very impressive.  Even if a false positive happens, the user has 30 days to check his or her Spam folder before the message is automatically deleted.

In short - I certainly recommend Google Apps!

Mike

Hello Sian,

My name is Kevin Wall with Plumas Rural Services.  We provide a variety of community assistance programs in Northern California.  When I took on this position a couple of years ago, the agency had bounced from one email service provider to another, each one suffering from a poor user interface, little to no anti-spam capabilities, horrendous periods of downtime, and/or poor administrative capabilities.  I also inherited a rather lackluster calendaring program.

We have anywhere between 50 and 70 employees at any given time spread throughout a large rural county.  Most either gave up on our agency email opting for personal email addresses and our ability to schedule people and resources were compromised.  Google Apps, quite literally, saved the day.  While I cannot provide any input regarding migration from Exchange to Apps, any headaches this may incur would be well worth it for the simplicity gained with Apps.  Every employee loves the user interface.  Many of our hardcore Outlook users (including myself) switched quickly to managing email over the web.

Administratively, Apps has saved me a lot of time and frustration.  It has worked correctly all the time.  Downtime has been minimal.  We've only recently began using the calendar app seriously.  With a little more extra effort in training everyone, the calendar app is working well for us.  As an agency, we have struggled with the concept of online collaboration, so I did use Google Docs for disseminating training materials as a way of introduction to the possibilities.

The absolute best part of Google Apps is the spam filtering.  My predecessor thought providing open email links on our website would be a good idea.  Needless to say the amounts and types of spam we received caused more than a few embarrassing moments for some of our staff.  When we started using Google Apps, we had around 75 email accounts, all receiving up to 200 to 300 spam messages a day.  With Google I can only think of two reports of legitimate email going to the spam folder and maybe a handful more of spam getting into a users inbox.  Once an email is identified as spam I never see it again.

Sorry for sounding like a Google Apps commercial, but when something works as well as this has for our agency, I know others will benefit greatly, if informed.

Kevin Wall

Technology Specialist

Plumas Rural Services

Thank you Mike for sharing!

When you were deploying Google apps, did you have to manually configure each faculty member or does GAFYD have a tool like Group Policy to allow single configuration distributions?

Thanks!

Thanks Kevin for sharing!

When I originally set up our accounts, I just imported them from a CSV file.  Since then, I have been manually managing the accounts, since there have been relatively few changes.  However, I have begun looking at using the relatively new Directory Sync to keep our Google Apps user accounts in sync with our Active Directory.

This is a great thread, and I'd like to keep it going. Some of my questions for people:

What challenges did you face in getting people to use Google Apps?

What carrot and/or stick strategies did you use to get everyone using such?

What was most important in training effectively?

What are non-tech staff actually using Google Apps for?

Looking forward to more discussion!

+1 for Google Apps

Yeah, you might have some headaches moving over from Exchange, but think of it like a divorce -- IT"S WORTH EVERY PENNY IN THE END!

Sian 

First let me say thanks for the post , I work for a non profit and we are looking into moving to google apps . I am looking at some things that might hinder us from doing so  1. We would have to have good apps only accessible during business hours for the hourly people  ( i was told that google apps could work with terminal services for authentication and if it will do this then we could control access times for some hourly employees) .

If you have any info on this please provide 

Thanks 

Aaron