Has anybody had any experience in using Google Apps Premier?

We're currently using a mix of POP3 and IMAP, and to be honest with 40 odd users, it's becoming a bit of a pain trying to manage backups. We also can't do anything like shared calendars etc.

I've been looking into hosted solutions, and Google Apps Premier seems to provide all of the features we need (25GB storage, Shared calendars, docs etc) for a fraction of the cost of exchange server, as well as (hopefully) none of the running headache in administrating it.

I ran their trial for 30 days on one of our lesser used domains, and it worked perfectly, however after reading a lot of online comments, I'm now not so sure.

A lot of people have reported problems in running the Apps Sync application, with it missing emails, not syncing etc. One thing I have noticed though is that most of these comments are from when Google first released this over a year ago. I can't really find any good or bad reviews from the last 6 months or so.

If anybody has any real world experience of it, good or bad, please let me know, as I'm struggling to find the info elsewhere.

I work in the IT department for a 4,000-plus employee multinational. We're watching this space with interest. Two significant companies in my part of the world have taken the plunge with Google Apps. New Zealand Post (equivalent to the Post Office in the UK) switched recently, in the largest Australasian deal Google has secured. See here for details. A large 1,000 employee high-tech company in Christchurch, Tait Electronics, also jumped on board with Google. See here for the details of that deal.

I'm sure a quick search for either of the above companies would find the CIO/IT managers' details, if you want to drop them a line and seek their views on how the change is going.

BTW, I see you are from Lincoln. I was born and bred there, but couldn't be much further away now :'( .

I'm in the early stages of looking at Google Apps for email.

We've got a couple of stand alone Exchange 2003 servers and while we've had a quote for two Exchange 2010 servers and licences, this does look like a tempting option.

I'm sorting out a lengthy list of features that we use and will see how convincing google's sales pitch is.

Edited 31 July, 201015 yr by Dr Zoidberg

I work in the IT department for a 4,000-plus employee multinational. We're watching this space with interest. Two significant companies in my part of the world have taken the plunge with Google Apps. New Zealand Post (equivalent to the Post Office in the UK) switched recently, in the largest Australasian deal Google has secured. See here for details. A large 1,000 employee high-tech company in Christchurch, Tait Electronics, also jumped on board with Google. See here for the details of that deal.

I'm sure a quick search for either of the above companies would find the CIO/IT managers' details, if you want to drop them a line and seek their views on how the change is going.

BTW, I see you are from Lincoln. I was born and bred there, but couldn't be much further away now :'( .

We'll that's something postive that I'll keep my eye on for the next few weeks - Thanks for the info.

It always amazes me how far away you meet fellow Lincolnians- A friend of mine also moved from Lincoln to Chrischurch about 6 or 7 years ago now. I've been looking at some pictures on facebook and it looks like such a fantastic place.