| I'll repost here what I commented on the article: -------------------------------------------------- Down here in Tucson, at the University of Arizona, we've been nothing but plagued with problems using this service. I hope the city of San Francisco has a better experience and receives more support than we have. I don't remember when the migration to the cloud platform started (the university was/is running their own Exchange install), but the deadline to switch over for all staff was early March. The migration process was afflicted with many problems: it was slow (you hoped it finished overnight), buggy (multiple attempts were necessary), there was often data loss and there were mis-deliveries or message loss for a few days after. That March deadline was postponed more than once and currently, the whole process has been halted leaving us with part of the staff on the cloud system and the other on our IT-managed install. A month or so ago (probably more), there was a town-hall meeting here with representatives and developers from Microsoft to apologize and to try and resolve some issues in person. The university gave them a two dozen item list of requirements before we proceeded any further with the service. Within the last three to four weeks there have been numerous outages, leaving those already angered here surely even more furious. If the Microsoft team can't meet our requirements and do it relatively soon, it's very possible that we'll drop this service. (A good chunk of the requirements are for legal compliance). Meanwhile in my department, we've started the move from a self-hosted Zimbra install to Google Apps for our domain a couple days ago as we can't use the Microsoft solution. Only problems so far are two administrators who use some features in Outlook that we can't replicate with Gmail without shoving a cylinder into a square hole. We might keep the open source version of Zimbra around just for them. What I do love about Google Apps is the ability to script it. I've already written code so that when a given Google Form is submitted, it creates other documents that would've had to have been done by hand, emails people and other things. Over time, this ability to script between Google Apps is going to invaluable for my department. Anyway, g'luck to the city! |