I just read this article The Top Ten Reasons to Outsource Your Enterprise Email to Gmail Now and I thought it merited a response.
- Lack of Support
The company I work for considered migrating to Gmail but when we contacted their support team in advance to clear up some concerns we had we never (ever) received a response. Thus we were struck with a new concern; what if something went wrong - would we be able to get a support response?
I don’t feel like there is any other reason to counter the eleven great reasons cited in the linked article. They are fairly compelling but without a sense that the support staff will be responsive when a problem arises none of the other things matter. Email is far too important to every company to just hope that support will turn up when you need it.
-—
Disclaimer: I love Gmail and I use it for all of my personal needs. My
personal email (and the email for my non-profit groups just isn’t as critical
as our business email) and thus I don’t mind trusting Gmail to handle all of
my personal email. The company I work for, however, has other priorities and
the lack of support is a critical failure of the Gmail platform.
Comments
Brettski
I have an issue at the moment that google are saying isn’t an issue.
It’s raised big concerns with my faith in there support team. Effectively,
only 1 mailbox on our domain is NOT receiving spam. This is an issue as that
user cannot whitelist any incorrectly identified spam. Google refuse to say
there is an issue. I’ve done about 10 gmail conversion and this is first issue
that is a real hurdle for me.
Bill
We were going to pay for the premiere version but it is hard to justify spending the money when we can’t even get our initial setup questions answered.
They have to make a minimum effort to sell the service and they did not. Since they didn’t seem to be interested in getting our $50 per user it is hard to know how much they will want to keep it.
Joshua
From what I remember you do have support if you pay. The premiere version is $50/user/year but has guarantees and support (for the administrator not end users). The free version your on your own though.
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html
Bill
That is only a valid point if our problem isn’t isolated. What happens, however, if something is wrong with just our domain? Would we be heard or would the 10 million happy voices drown us out?
Mike
You don’t need support. 10 million screaming voices will get your issue fixed.