Google Apps vs Office 365 vs Exchange

[unmode]

Our head of ICT is heavily pushing for us to migrate from Exchange to GMail. I'm very much in favour of migrating to a cloud based system, but a lot of schools seem to be opting for Office 365 rather than Gmail.

 

Is there anyone here who has done a migration from Exchange to GMail for 2000 users? How did it go, and why did you choose Google over Microsoft?

 

Thanks

[zag]

The migration is not the problem, that should be pretty easy. But take a look at the end products.

 

IMO Google mail is more suited to primary schools and Office 365 to Secondary and Universities.

 

We use Office 365 here and very happy with the Exchange Online element of it.

[DGardiner]

We have ran googleapps for about 3-4 years here and while i wish we had office 365 so we could have a web based office package - I'm don't feel the need to change that much. just not having to run the mail/exchange servers - i do prefer gmail however and the gmail outlook connector satisfies the people who MUST HAVE OUTLOOK

[unmode]

Thanks guys. Was there any thought about how you would transfer to another system if you needed to? For example, if we move to Gmail is there an easy way to get our data out later on and move to Office 365?

[EduTech]

Thanks guys. Was there any thought about how you would transfer to another system if you needed to? For example, if we move to Gmail is there an easy way to get our data out later on and move to Office 365?

 

Hi,

 

If you were to migrate to Google and then at a later date decided to migrate from Google to Office 365 then you would do this from an E-Mail perspective using the IMAP migration method.

 

For more information around this please see the following KB Article: Migrate Email from an IMAP Server to Exchange Online Mailboxes: Exchange Online Help

 

James.

[robjduk]

I vote google. Docs is great and chromebooks are the best thing you will ever manage