Gmail Apps for Domains

So for the last couple months skinnyCorp has been working on moving hosts. It has been pretty fun and interesting and there are a few things that we have been hesitating moving because it is such a pain in the ass. One of those things is email.

Man, I hate email. I mean - I love writing it and getting it. But managing email servers could quite possibly be the most annoying things. So our email eventually had to be moved. So we talked about it and decided that a hosted email platform would be the best bet for us. Then we don't have to worry about it and most importantly there would be spam protection and what not. So we looked and looked and Rackspace popped up with their managed Exchange beta and we tried it out. The beta was awesome. They had great support and the control panel was pretty cool. It was quite nice. However - outlook and exchange just didn't fit the skinnyCorp way. It was a bit rougher than we wanted or needed. The transition wasn't quite how we wanted - although it wasn't hard, it just wasn't the solution that felt right.

So after a bit of research I decided to try out the Google hosted apps program, and specifically Gmail. We signed up and after a bit of configuring we changed our MX records and are now rocking it. It is quite awesome. We have a login page, a calendar and the ability to chat. All in a browser.

The pure speed of us getting everything up is also quite impressive. We had the exchange server up for 2 weeks and not everyone was one it. It was a pain in the ass to move people and nobody really liked it. We had almost everyone up at work with Gmail for Domains in about an hour. It was really fast.

So I guess we will have to see how it holds up. The client is obviously good and everyone at work likes the interface - so we shall see how it turns out. I hope well. cuz I love Google.