I’ve migrated all our mail from MS Exchange to Google Apps and so far I’m extremely pleased with the results, here’s why:

My entire mail archive is now properly searchable, 10,000+ messages from the past four years, so no more slow trawls through Outlook. No need to perform backups. Increased storage, I don’t need to delete any old mail. Better spam prevention; Google’s spam software seems to actually work. I can access my mail remotely using Gmail – by far the best browser based email application. Now Gmail has IMAP support I can use Thunderbird or Outlook. Much lower cost (free for non-profits).

Of course there are disadvantages. One of the largest being privacy: Google now has access to an awful lot of my personal information. The decision to switch requires a real investment of trust in the Googleplex. You can read more here.

exchange vs. google apps, gmail, googleplex, mail archive, ms exchange