<kassissiehr@catlin.edu> wrote:
>We're sticking with Exchange. I love the feature set of Google Apps, but I
>have serious reservations about: 1) their nonexistent customer service when
>failures happen well documented this past summer on education listservs;
We switched to Google Apps in September and I've been testing for close to 2
years. I've heard this criticism before and completely disagree. I've posted
several support request and have received excellent support. Furthermore,
uptime with Google Apps has been excellent, far better than we could provide
with our own servers and Internet connection.
One criticism that was valid up until this fall is that Google did not
communication upgrades well with new features appearing with no notice.
Google has significantly improved their communication regarding upgrades
using several blogs and they have a known issues page which is also very
helpful.
>2) storing loads of critical, sensitive information about your school
>community in the cloud (on someone else's servers, among thousands of
>servers, that are also hosting other people's content). We prefer to host
>enterprise-level data here on campus.
Again, I disagree. Data stored on Google's servers is far more secure and
backed up better than any school could hope to do with their own servers and
tech staff.
Time is a zero-sum game so every minute (and dollar) we save not having to
manager a email server and email clients is time that we can devote to the
types of things that can't be outsourced and generally have a more direct
impact on our core mission.
--
Tom Phelan
Director of Technology
Peddie School
tphelan@peddie.org
Office: 609.944.7625
Fax: 609.944.7913
http://www.peddie.org
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