On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 8:22 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: Using Google Apps for what?

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 11:22 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: Where was this announced / discussed ? Or, how the heck did you find out?? ;-) -- John Vandenberg

Howdy, As a quick introduction, I'm Jon Davis[1], one of the Office IT guys in the SF office. Since the Google Apps migrations is one of my major projects, I'll try to answer your questions the best I can. Replies in line. On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 17:22, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote: You are correct. I gave a presentation yesterday morning to the staff. I'm impressed that you're already on top of this. Yes, the decision has been made. Office IT did the original research and made our recommendations to the CxO level. I presume you mean benefits over our existing setup. In which case some of the answers are: integrated calendaring, shared contacts, web based access and general integration. The problem with this question is the word "comparable". Yes, there is a multiplicity of software that does _similar_ but just because it is similar means one will work in place of the other (Gimp vs Photoshop for example). Office IT spent many hours evaluating a number of email/calendaring/contact solutions, most of which were Open Source (but we had some other options in there like Google Apps). Based on our specific needs (which is more than just the few high level points above), Google Apps was the only reasonable choice. Something else to consider is what "open source" means. Many of the "open source" options aren't totally open source. In order to get the full feature set or have more than a handful of users, you have to pay them for a license. So while many of these products advertise themselves as "open source", a large portion of the features (possibly everything that would make us want to switch) is not actually open source code. One of the important things to remember is that even though Google is closed source, they use open standards. We will migrate our email in via IMAP, our calendars via iCalendar, and (should we wish to to do so) we can leave the exact same way. Nothing about this migration will be locking us in. In fact, we already have plans to revisit the open source options (after a reasonable amount of time has passed) to see how they have evolved. If in a few years time an OSS solution will meet our needs - we'll switch back over. Is there a concern that this will bring Google and the Wikimedia Foundation Google Inc had nothing to do with this decision. When we wanted to pursue the Google Apps project further, we contacted a sales rep. In the end, we went through the process like any other group would, and we pay the standard price. We were not afforded any luxuries nor were any corners cut due to or in spite of our relationship with Google. Are there concerns about Google's privacy practices? It doesn't seem The EULA for Google Apps [3] is slightly different than the normal one. We continue to own our data and Google doesn't. [4] We have had the EULA reviewed by legal counsel, as well as our in-house tech staff, and received the opinion that the privacy provisions were strong enough to meet our needs. I hope this helps to answer some of the questions about Google Apps specifically. I'm sorry for the slow reply, but you caught me at the end of the day yesterday. Thank you- -Jon [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_contractors [2] http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/customers.html [3] http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/user_terms.html [4] http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60762