Google Apps grows into Education

Devnet: 07/07/2008

The NSW Department of Education and Training has decided to switch their 1.5 million student email accounts from Outlook/Exchange infrastructure to Gmail/Apps. This move is said to be one of the largest private deployments of Gmail anywhere in the world and shows the power of Google services which are based on open platforms around Google Apps. 

Macquarie University has already seen the advantage and switched their 68,000 students to Gmail. 

Educational institutions can utilise the power of Google’s servers to support the range of Google Applications such as Google Docs, Presentation, Spreadsheets, Calendar & Sites and reduce their overall IT budgets. 

This story highlights that Microsoft is coming under increasing pressure by competitors who are beginning to nibble away at its Exchange cash cow, offering great products on hosted solutions for great value.

Many businesses can now avoid the issues and expense of installing Microsoft Exchange Server.  The other advantage to business is Gmail servers look after all email infrastructure requirements.

The 'software-as-a-service' model is based around Cloud Computing with much of the infrastructure sitting off site with no requirement for the business to maintain IT infrastructure. 

Benefits of Gmail begin with cost, as hosted Microsoft Exchange is considerably more expensive than Google Apps at the Enterprise level.

The monthly cost of a premium hosted Exchange account through a ISP is $AUD19.95 per mailbox, per month vs an equivalent Google Apps Enterprise account costs $AUD59 per mailbox per year.  That’s a saving to business per user of around $180/year. 

With many SME growing rapidly Gmail reduces extra weight Microsoft Exchange products place on the IT budget.   While both accounts offer different features - the Hosted Exchange account, offers free mobile email access while the Google email account offers more than 10 times the storage capacity also providing full POP3/IMAP access for use with mobile devices.

All these features are being offered free to education users as Google offers a full product suite to education which effectively gives institutions an unlimited number of email accounts plus full access to all other Google Apps services like Google Docs, Spreadsheets and Calendaring.

If your business is looking for a reliable alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint servers, contact Enterprise Specialist Devnet and we can tailor a solution that will match your requirements.