Microsoft still dominates the email world and desktop, especially in the enterprise. In a bid to maintain that dominance and compete with a growing range of Cloud vendors (especially Google), Microsoft is migrating customers to hosted Exchange and Office 2010 will include limited free web versions of the Office tools.
While larger organizations are not yet migrating away from Exchange and Office, it's not readily apparent to me how Microsoft is going to successfully compete with the new tools available, especially Google Apps. Google continues to add functionality and integrate Google Apps with other applications in a much quicker development cycle than Microsoft. Add to that pricing - here is Google's online calculator comparing the cost of Google Apps Premier Edition to Microsoft Exchange 2007. For cost sensitive businesses, and who isn't these days, this calculator alone is a compelling reason to at least look at Google, if not make the switch.
When On-Site Technical Solutions looked at Google Apps late last year we pretty much scoffed at the application and told ourselves it was simply not an effective business tool. When we looked again early this summer, we found a tool that could certainly replace Microsoft Exchange, especially in smaller organizations running Exchange primarily for mail and shared calendars. We became our own guinea pigs before beginning to roll Google Apps out to our customers. Some of us are still using Outlook to manage the mail with Google Sync, but others are simply using the web interface. Since we rolled out Google Apps this summer Google has added or improved to do lists, folders in documents, sync, and well, take a look here.
The Los Angeles City Council approved a contract to migrate their 30,000 employees to Google and according to the LA Times Microsoft was furiously fighting off the challenge.
Google has been rolling along in the education arena with free email and collaboration tools for schools. Back in September Google highlighted their education success on their blog with the headline Five million students going back to school are "going Google." But the LA city contract is worth a reported $7.25m and opens the door to smaller cities if Google is successful in LA.
Swapping out mail in an enterprise is a very large project. I would expect larger organizations to lag in implementing a new mail system, or any cloud application for that matter. It's a very big, costly deal and the organization needs someone in IT to bank their career on driving the change. As Google continues to add functionality it's going to be more difficult for Microsoft to compete with the current pricing.
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Other Links:
Microsoft Exchange Server or Google Apps? A Comparison
Google Apps is now an Exchange-replacement; Users can even keep Outlook
Exchange 2010 tries to fend off Google Apps
Google Apps: A Long Road Ahead
Outlook Separation Anxiety Holds Back Google Apps
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