Ian, some very fine points indeed – I think Outlook is inherently built into Corporate culture, a little like pointless meetings and politics!

Most users don’t know anything but Outlook, and indeed the PC platform (poor them). Macs in the Corporate world are still pretty rare as far as I know, especially in the UK. The mention of Linux would cause total confusion!

All kinds of factors will affect the outcome; Are your users passionate users of Windows, Mac or Linux or platform agnostic? Will you support a mix of platforms or only one? Are all the users on the same LAN or working remotely over the Internet? How important is back-up and file sharing? How secure should the service be? Do you have usage policies? Will you need to support synchronisation with PDA’s or smartphones? What’s your budget? Look for hidden costs that are presented when you introduce services that your users are not familiar with.

If you approach this pragmatically and listen to your users you can really bring value to your business, reduce lost productivity and increase data integrity / security and accessibility.

Go IT heroes!

Regarding Rob Thomson i am not sure it does put the IT department out of business. At least I hope the department did more than spend all its time supporting Exchange and outlook!

My firm is very small- there are 5 of us, and we use Google Docs. We’re all quite dorky, with mixed PC estate (Windows, Macs, Linux). it works quite well.

One thing that isn’t very well flagged in Google’s documentation are the specific Outlook integrations for IMAP and calendar. http://www.jakeludington.com/ask_jake/20060818_how_to_sync_google_calendar_with_outlook_and_smartphones_automatically.html

Welcome, and thanks for posting!

I’m sure that non-techies have that built in (and very strong) bond to Outlook because they know no different. I am guessing here, but these people may not even have a personal email account and hence rely on using Outlook at home too (using their work email address).

Anybody remotely technical will have Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or if they know what they’re doing, Gmail, and so will be very familiar with the Google offering.

I’m surprised that Google don’t have onlie training for new users… perhaps this is coming soon.

Our own experience has been mixed over the last four months since we switched off of Exchange. Techie users tend to like Google Apps while Sales and other non-tech folks resist it almost across the board.

Though we’ve certainly run into real problems with buggy features, the resistance appears to be almost entirely born out of a bond to Outlook. Unfortunately, Outlook is just, flat-out, not a good mail client when not used with an Exchange server. Our sales guys cling to it because it’s what they know and end up having a poor experience since it doesn’t work as well with gmail over IMAP.

If I could only get Google to fix my Calendar resources (which have not worked for months now), the only thing left would be to develop a training program for new employees.

I guess I was holding back a little with my original post about a steep learning curve…. Change is something 95%+ people hate, so something like this is going to be a biggy!

Would I be right in saying that most people did not even know that Google offered this service!?

I remember when the company I worked for rolled out laptops for salespeople and we were literally showing people how to turn them on, let alone create a folder on the desktop.

I think you’re spot on about the Google Apps – great access and integration.

The biggest selling point has been the ability to use g-mail with mobile devices. It is TW’s intention to role out blackberries to all its employees.

We have g-mail but not google apps yet, which should hopefully make a big difference to the way we work, and cut down the silos that individual servers have created!

It is nice to see the real reason why we’ve switched though (£££)