The IT department of any small business is faced with the challenges of storage, security, and disaster recovery.  As a video production company in Dallas, we share similar issues.  I have been managing the IT at AMS Pictures for over 10 years, and will discuss our recent path to upgrade our e-mail system.

Our company had run e-mail on Microsoft Exchange since the late 90’s.  Originally we were running Exchange 5.5 and later migrated to Exchange 2003.    With 75 users, we faced many of the same e-mail issues as other small businesses:  Users wanted more storage and accessibility.  Management insisted on reliability and fast disaster recovery.

Users had very limited mailbox sizes and relied heavily on PST files to store their messages.  This resulted in a set of problems surrounding PST file management: backup, security, and portability.  Perhaps most frustrating was that PST files typically existed in one location, and you could not access that information from a mobile device or a computer at home.

Although we never had a major e-mail outage, the potential for this scenario was always a concern of mine.   I knew that if our physical Exchange server was somehow destroyed, it could easily be days before everything was back online from the backups.  Over the past decade, e-mail has become central to our daily work.  With a high dependency on one system – from both employees and customers, I wanted a better disaster recovery plan.

In early 2010, our e-mail server was 5 years old, running outdated Exchange 2003.  With goals of increased storage and better disaster preparedness, I began research for a migration to Exchange 2010.  As we looked at Exchange 2010, I was excited about the new features available such as high a

vailability between multiple data centers.  The plan would be to deploy two Exchange servers, one in our home office of Dallas, and a second in our smaller office in Austin.

Designing and implementing this was going to require substantial work, and installation and maintenance costs quickly became a factor.  Additionally, we did not have experience with this type of deployment, and at least some outside help would be required.

On top of that, certain parts of this high-availability model seemed complex and overkill for a small organization of 75 employees.  This complexity was prone to configuration errors or human mistakes.  What if we spent all this time, effort and money to create a fault tolerant environment, and then we had outages because of configuration problems?  That would be hard to explain – especially since we never had any problems on our budget Exchange server that was 5 years old!

Creating a fault tolerant e-mail system proved to be a complicated, expensive, and somewhat risky proposition for a company of our size.  There had to be a better answer!

I was vaguely familiar with cloud-hosted e-mail solutions prior to this, but never had explored them in much detail.  It wasn’t until I was getting deeper into the planning stages of Exchange 2010 that I took a closer look at the hosted options.  My first inclination was to use a hosted Exchange solution, but I quickly found this approach cost-prohibitive.  Microsoft charges for each license regardless of whether I’m using it in my data center or someone else’s.  And the total cost for an Exchange hosted solution seemed much higher than I was willing to pay.

Google Apps was the next most-obvious solution, although several others were also researched.  As I initially looked into Google, I honestly didn’t think it would work, and there were many unanswered questions:  Could my users really give up Outlook?  Will it be more difficult using a web browser for e-mail?  How would features like calendar, contacts, and public folders transition?

We decided to try Google Apps for a limited number of users – and began a pilot program with myself and a few other users.  We turned off Outlook and started using Google Apps for about a month.  Our mail was routed through Google’s servers while everyone else continued to use Exchange.  This was beneficial because it allowed us to test Google without making a commitment.   We were happy with the test, and had the added benefit of gaining familiarity with Google before switching the whole company over.

We did a transition of 75 users over to Google Apps during a weekend.  Google has tools that migrate data from Exchange into their cloud service, and we did so without significant issues.

The biggest user complaint was the loss of Outlook, and relying exclusively on a web interface.  It took some users a while to get used to the new layout and different ways of doing things.   Additionally, employees had to get used to labels instead of folders, and rely more on powerful search features rather than obsessively filing every e-mail into the correct folder.

While the transition was painful for those entrenched in Microsoft Outlook, many other employees already familiar with Google had no significant problems.  We deployed Chrome onto our Windows desktops, which is a very stable web browser and improves the user experience with Google Mail.

The benefits of Google far outweigh the initial user complaints.  The ability to keep every e-mail online forever (at least 25GB worth) is most notable.  The ability to quickly search through years of messages (from any device) is also game changing.  Gone are the days of opening PST files and slowly searching for archived messages.

Google Apps includes several cloud-based programs in addition to e-mail. This includes documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.   All of these applications have been built to support collaboration, which far exceeds our previous experience with Microsoft Office.  It has also been a great convenience to have documents available anywhere.  However, the Google applications lack many features from Microsoft Office, and for us it is not a replacement.   The only Office application we completely replaced was Outlook.

Perhaps the most significant benefit of Google Mail is that e-mail is accessible from any device, anywhere, with all the same features as when you are sitting at your desk.  It does not whether you are on a PC or Mac – a real benefit to employees in a creative business who tend to be Mac-centric.

From the IT standpoint, the primary benefit is that we gain two levels of fault tolerance with Google Apps.  First, Google has fault tolerance built into its service by using multiple datacenters.  Second, our e-mail messaging is completely independent from our physical IT infrastructure.   It is comforting to know that any conceivable disaster at our facility will not affect our e-mail messaging.  Conversely, a problem with Google’s cloud is isolated to only that service.

Of all the services to consider for cloud-migration, e-mail seems to make the most sense.  E-mail is accessed from everywhere, not just within the corporate network like the old days.  Additionally, e-mail relies on constant communication with other servers on the Internet.  The more I think about it, it hardly makes sense to not put it in the cloud.

Overall, our company has been very happy with Google Apps.  From an IT standpoint, we’ve certainly never looked back.

Have you had an experience with an e-mail migration?  How are you supporting user’s demand for additional storage while providing fault tolerance?