Google Apps - why?

[Simcfc73]

As an old man of almost 40 years I am struggling to understand the desire to move to Google apps or office 365. I am sure I am wrong and the $$$ savings can be good but the recovery/backup problem really rules it out for me. Google say Document and file recovery policy If you can't find an item in All items, Trash, or by searching, it may have been permanently removed from Google Drive or deleted by someone else.

Anything that has been permanently deleted from Google Drive by the owner, or if the owner's account was deleted, can't be recovered. It’s also not possible to recover anything in Google Drive after a Google Apps domain administrator deletes someone's account. I wouldn't mind integrating it to what we have but chromebooks again seem to provide more issues than solutions. We seem to have a ABM attitude coming through. Can anyone help persuade me, I really don't want to be seen to be old skool.

[mdench]

As a young man of 19 I use google docs for sharing various things with the others in the office but I'm still not looking forward to moving the whole school it. Keep being given the its really good because you can use it anywhere and have loads of people using it etc but I'm yet to see it in action and like you say I haven't seen very much info in terms of how much control you have over backup regimes and the retention time on those backups. So i can see it all going well till those one or two kids come in looking for work they removed over 3 - 5 weeks ago and then we get it in the neck because we can't retrieve it back for them.

[CESIL]

As far as I can tell the system managers are finally seeing their chance to rule again after the anarchy of computer users having control of their own data

 

The rot started with networks and then thin clients...the cloud is their chance to really grab you by the b@lls

 

Actually for private use I can see the benefit of Google Docs...no more microsoft licences for one and access from anyway for another...but in truth I am not sure how often that will be useful for non-work related files...

 

...but then again I am even older than the OP (ie over 50)

 

..also I don't really get the appeal of tablet devices that can do only some of what my full computers can do...

Edited May 9, 2013 by CESIL

[pcstru]

To my mind the real seller is Google Drive and platform interoperability, no more USB keys, no more emailing yourself a document or emailing it to colleagues. It's just there and usable (to some degree) on any device with a browser, anywhere you have a connection. That's simple but quite powerful.

[mdench]

One of the 6th formers who works with us went to the FT in london for a weeks work experience and they are entirely Google Apps based and it seemed to work really well for them. I think its one of those that alot of investigating and a lot of thinking through is required with a clear plan and time scale of transition

[hardtailstar]

to me, I see it just as a personal thing, I use it and its brilliant. Im not so keen on using it for education though.

[localzuk]

For collaboration etc... Google Apps is great. The school I was at last year used it to great effect. However, you need to plan your system around it. The backup issue is a real one, but can be countered by paying for a backup solution for it. Services to backup an entire domain exist - https://www.backupify.com/products/google-apps-backup for example. $990 a year for backup, as an example. (That's a US one, but you'd obviously want to investigate different options).

 

The issue is available resources in school - lots of schools have scaled back their IT support, so maintaining in house systems might simply be too much to handle.

[mdench]

I wouldn't want to have to pay out for another backup solution seeing as our current solution works fine and sits on 28TB of storage. Then the other argument is that each student / staff gets 5gb of storage. Do they upload their entire docs area to the cloud or just word, ppt, excel etc as some of our users are pushing 9gb home areas with alot of those doing multimedia work so yes they could upload their photo shop files etc to the web so they could access them anywhere but then involves downloading / uploading materials all the time

[caffrey]

I see savings in removing the exchange server (It's getting old) and removing the spam filter we use, although I am taking my time (aka I haven't got any) as I'm not looking forward to the switch over.

[mdench]

Any body know how good the spam filter is and manageable it is? We get quite a lot of spam throughout the day

[localzuk]

I wouldn't want to have to pay out for another backup solution seeing as our current solution works fine and sits on 28TB of storage. Then the other argument is that each student / staff gets 5gb of storage. Do they upload their entire docs area to the cloud or just word, ppt, excel etc as some of our users are pushing 9gb home areas with alot of those doing multimedia work so yes they could upload their photo shop files etc to the web so they could access them anywhere but then involves downloading / uploading materials all the time

 

You shouldn't decide what you're going to do with the future of your email and collaborative working systems based on what you currently have... If everyone did that, we would all still be using ancient systems as they did what they were intended for at the time of purchase, so why not now?

 

Google Apps isn't a replacement for your network storage, that is a given. You wouldn't want to be storing videos and photoshop files on it - you'd need a *huge* internet connection for the downloading and uploading of those files to work with.

 

Treat it as an email system and a collaborative office solution and you will get a lot out of it though. Word processing files/spreadsheets etc... are pretty small. I think in a year of its use up there, our solution was using about 50GB of data total, for 1200 users (staff and students).

 

Any body know how good the spam filter is and manageable it is? We get quite a lot of spam throughout the day

 

Its excellent. In the year I used it at the other school, I don't think I received a single item of spam.

[Simcfc73]

As Windows only school I do need to embrace this stuff, we are muted to get ipads int he summer and maybe some chromebooks. I have google apps setup and linked to the school but haven't used it in anger, I just dont see the point when i have a fully functional office suite already here. As for email, tempted but would more than likely go to office 365 rather than google. Man I sound negative.

[maark]

We have been using it here for past year - replaced old exchange setup and saved a lot of money rather than upgrading to new version of exchange.

Mail has been fine, though not as integrated with Outlook as exchange - spam filters are good - puts everything into junk mail folder.

Collaboration and sharing are really good - can choose whether to share with individual, group or whole world. Staff probably not using it as much as they could with students though. Several people can work simultaneously on one document.

Advantages with mobile devices as you can use google drive.

Also people can create stuff using google docs from home even if they don't have office installed - it auto-saves as you work on it.

[sted]

Advantages with mobile devices as you can use google drive.

 

have you ever tried to use the spreadsheet on a tablet my god its one of the most frustrating things ive ever attempted and that was my simple mpg sheet for my car which i keep on googloe drive

[Gibson335]

I can't see either replacing network user data storage and shared data storage entirely, not in the near- or medium-future, but instead treated as an enhancement to the on-site facilities and resources. I wonder if I'm alone in carrying my network with me on a memory stick, with 2 external HDDs as my daily and weekly backups?

[edutech4schools]

We use bits and bobs from Gapps. One of my schools uses it with the Governors, so they can add notes and audit trails to important documents getting signed off. A few others use the Sites as a website / VLE.

[Obiwan]

for example. $990 a year for backup, as an example.

$990 per month, which makes it rather more pricey.