Kicking the Habit: Ditching MS Exchange and Blackberry Enterprise Server for Google Apps

Background

About a year ago, I started to research Google Apps, an offering from Google which offers corporations free email, calendar, and document management solutions. While the document management isn’t nearly as feature complete as an Office Suite (Microsoft or Open), the email offering was impressive. Our organization had spent thousands upon thousand of dollars on servers, not to mention the even higher cost of legally licensing Windows, Exchange, and Blackberry Enterprise Server. Since our versions were getting a bit long in the tooth, and the cost of upgrading the servers and licenses approaching $25,000, I suggested we move to Google Apps. Everyone in my organization is married to their Microsoft products, so keeping the familiarity of Outlook was a must. About half of our organization has Blackberries, so keeping the same functionality they rely on there was paramount.

Here’s the kicker: I wanted to do this all for free.

What is Google Apps?

I’m primarily going to focus on the email aspect of Google Apps, which offers you all the features of Gmail, for free, but with your own domain to administer. What that means in English is that your email address can be your.name@yourdomain.com instead of your.name@gmail.com. Google Apps is free for organizations to use, with certain minimal restrictions. First of all, every individual account comes with 8 gigabytes of storage for free. You can also pay $50 a year per account to up that total to 25 gigabytes. Why anyone would ever need that much, I can’t conceive, but the option is there. More details on what you get if you pay can be seen here; the fee is waived for educational institutions and non-profits. If you want more than 100 user accounts, it is still free, but you have to specifically request them from Google.

First Steps

Setting up Google Apps is incredibly easy, even for someone who doesn’t have administrator level technical skills. You simply use the web to set your settings, just about as easily as ordering something from Amazon. They provide in-depth details for changing your DNS settings so that you can retrieve your email on the web (http://mail.yourdomain.com) and make sure all mail is routed correctly to their servers. The directions for setting up a mail client (such as Outlook or Outlook Express) are incredibly easy to follow, that most of my users who have problems finding the power button set themselves up. Please note: after creating an account, you will have to log in to the account through the web based system to activate it. Then go to SETTINGS, FORWARDING AND POP, and activate POP or IMAP, or both, depending on how you wish to download your email.

Now, the First Tricky Part: Gotchas with Exchange

If your users have been using Exchange with Outlook, there are some additional steps you are going to need to take. First off, back up all their email, contacts, calendar, and tasks to a PST file using the File/Export function from Outlook. Then create a new data file and set up Outlook using POP for the primary email with Google Apps instructions. You can then re-import their old email to the new Personal Folders tree, under the new data file, under Google Apps. But you’re still not done.

Go into the Contacts. Click the view to be “Phone List.” Right click the top bar (where is says “FULL NAME” and other fields), and select FIELD CHOOSER. Under the drop-down in the dialog that appears, select “EMAIL FIELDS.” Drag the button that says “EMAIL ADDRESS TYPE” next to the “FULL NAME” listing on the bar. Then click the EMAIL ADDRESS TYPE heading to sort. Edit any contact that lists “EX” for “EMAIL ADDRESS TYPE” and re-enter the email address under the contact, so it saves as “SMTP.” This is a bit of a pain, but your email will not route correctly to any of those contacts if you don’t do this.

Next, close out Outlook, and download the NK2View utility. Extract it to your desktop, and run it. This will show you all of your Auto-Complete entires. Sort by type again. Select any that are marked “EX”, and delete them all. Don’t worry, this file auto-manages itself, so it will rebuild as you sent to those email addresses again. If you don’t do these steps, the messages will be stuck in your Outbox. If they get stuck, close and re-open Outlook, and immediately go to your Outbox. Double click on the message that isn’t sending, and manually re-type the persons address after you have performed the two steps above.

Now, the Second Tricky Part: Blackberry

All Blackberries I have encountered (Sprint, Nextel and Verizon as providers) give free access to Blackberry Internet Service, which can mimic most of the functions of Blackberry Enterprise Server through a web-based interface. Simply find the URL to Blackberry Internet Service (for Sprint, it is http://www.sprint.blackberry.com), and create a BIS account using the device ESN and PIN number. From there, you can integrate with Google Apps in one of two ways.

In the first method, you can create an email associated with the Blackberry device. If you do this and edit the setting, you can set the email “reply to” email to be your actual email, rather than the Blackberry device email. Then log into the web mail interface through Google Apps, and go to SETTINGS, FORWARDING AND POP. Forward a copy of each email to the Blackberry Internet Service email address you set up for the device.

In the second method, you can poll Google Apps using POP or IMAP. Follow the web based settings, and enter pop.gmail.com for your server, with your user name as your.user.name@yourdomain.com, server as pop.gmail.com, and your password. Emails will arrive in two to three minutes, rather than instantly in the first method, but you can also set it to automatically delete and reconcile with your main account. In the first method, even if you delete an email from your Blackberry, you’ll have to also delete it from your Outlook or web mail as well.

Pros and Cons

We’ve been extremely happy with the transition, but it is a lot to complete. It has saved our organization a lot of money, provided a much improved web based email system (exactly the same as gmail), and given us some new features (we now can deliver office voice mail to Blackberry as well,for employees on the road, as an example). It is incredibly feature rich.

A few things that you will no longer be able to do: there is no more shared calendar under Outlook, however, you can still send meeting notices through email to everyone’s individual calendars. Also, Blackberry wireless sync will not work for calendar, however, whenever you sync the computer using Blackberry desktop manager, your Outlook calendar will be in sync with your Blackberry.

I would highly recommend taking a look at Google Apps. It could be a big money saver for most organizations out there, with very few features missing, and work arounds for most of those missing features. Our organization has greatly benefited from the transition.