Now you can migrate email, contacts and calendar data from on-premise and hosted Microsoft® Exchange to Google Apps, whether you have just a few users or tens of thousands.

Feature Overview

• Perform a centrally managed bulk migration of users
• Selectively migrate email, calendar or contacts (or any combination thereof)
• Migrate in phases for very large migrations

Businesses of all sizes are migrating their email systems to Google Apps (though many are moving from Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise, not Microsoft Exchange).  You can see some of the case studies and stories on this Google page.  Google Apps is clearly a good fit for these businesses or they would not have made the move, but I’ll be honest, every time the idea has been floated for a customer I’ve talked to there has been some requirement that makes it impractical or impossible to move to Google.

Among Google Apps’ benefits are cost reductions for some customers and better support than their in-house staff can provide.  Feature-wise Google Apps certainly does provide a basic email, calendar, and contacts experience.  In some areas it is lagging behind though, such as this recently announced Google Labs (ie, experimental) Smart Scheduler for Google Calendar which provides similar “Autopick” functionality for scheduling meeting times to what has been in Exchange and Outlook since the 2003 editions.

I was curious enough to read the Administration Guide for Google’s new migration tool.  The migration process is interesting enough, but even more interesting are the features that are not migrated to Google Apps.  These include:

• Public Folders
• Inbox Rules (have to recreate as Filters)
• Importance Levels (not available at all in Google Mail)
• Signatures (available in Google Mail but you can’t have multiple signatures that you manually insert as required)
• Shared Mailboxes
• Categories for mail, calendar, or contact items
• Out of Office status
• Calendar attachments
• “Rich” content in calendar items (eg hperlinks, text formatting)
• Flags and follow up reminders on Contacts
• Notes
• Tasks
• Journal Entries
• RSS Feeds

Some of those are mild inconveniences at the small end of the scale, but become massive inconveniences when you scale it up to thousands of users when you consider the time and effort required to educate your user base about these kinds of impacts prior to the migration, and field the inevitable support requests that come up afterwards.

Some of these are total showstoppers, for example if your business makes use of SharePoint workflows that assign Tasks.  Public Folders, though deprecated in recent Exchange Server versions, are still critical to many organizations as well, and Google offers no direct substitute that I can see.

Some features appear on par with Exchange, such as the archiving and discovery capabilities.  Google Apps includes Postini for email spam and virus filtering, which is well regarded in the industry and performs well in my experience with good self service controls for end users to manage their own quarantines and rules.

Postini also has content based policies that are similar to Exchange Transport Rules though they appear less flexible than what is available in Exchange Server 2007/2010.

In other areas that are quickly becoming important to businesses, such as Rights Management integration and Unified Communications, the Microsoft offering seems to be well in front (particular Microsoft’s tightly integrated UC experience across its many Office application and server products).

For Google Apps I can’t find any information on what customers should do about their non-Exchange mail requirements, such as mail-enabled scanner/printer devices or LoB applications that use SMTP for routing messages to internal and external recipients.  If the solution is to keep an on-site SMTP server available that somewhat undermines the Google “Manage your business, not your mail server” marketing.

Exchange Server 2010 is an outstanding product that delivers real benefits to businesses of all sizes, and has amazing integration across the Microsoft product line for collaboration and communications.  I work with customers to implement and support Exchange Server every day.

At home I’m a Google Apps user myself.  I use the free edition to host email for some of my domains because I’m a one-man business and it makes little sense to run an Exchange Server all to myself, not to mention the hardware costs which I’d rather keep invested in my Exchange labs instead.  But for customers who have taken even just a few steps away from the basic email, calendar and contacts usage of Exchange I struggle to see the benefits of moving to Google Apps.

Related posts:

• Get-MailboxReport.ps1 – PowerShell Script to Generate Mailbox Reports
• Error: Outlook Was Unable to Recover Some or All of the Items in this Folder
• Using Test-Mailflow with Exchange 2003 Servers
• Should You Defrag Exchange Server Mailbox Databases?
• Using Test-ServiceHealth for Exchange Server Health Checks

This article Should You Migrate from Exchange Server to Google Apps? is © 2010 ExchangeServerPro.com

Get more Exchange Server tips at ExchangeServerPro.com

Check out the full list of videos here.

Related posts:

• TechEd Video: Exchange 2010 Virtualization
• TechEd Video: Upgrading to Exchange 2010: Notes from Field
• TechEd Video: Load Balancing with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
• Free Exchange Server Technical Education Videos
• Why Does Exchange Server Not Allow In-Place Upgrades?

This article Exclusively Exchange 2010 Interview and Demo Videos is © 2009 ExchangeServerPro.com

Get more Exchange Server tips at ExchangeServerPro.com

• New UM Administrator, UM Recipient Administrator, and UM Prompt Administrator roles so that UM management can be delegated properly.
• Personal auto-attendant.
• “Red lamp” or Message Wait Indicator (MWI) support.  This was a show stopper for some UM deployments with our own customers so its good to see support is now included.  Although as the UM guys note, the majority of people check their inbox before they check their voicemail so the MWI issue turned out to be far less critical than many thought.
• Voice to text transcripts for voicemails (claiming about 75% accuracy).  Handy for previewing voicemails, checking voicemail in crowded/noisy locations, or as I noted recently this is potentially a huge benefit for the hearing impaired.

Related posts:

• Should You Migrate from Exchange Server to Google Apps?
• Exclusively Exchange 2010 Interview and Demo Videos
• Get-MailboxReport.ps1 – PowerShell Script to Generate Mailbox Reports
• Avoid Running Out of Transaction Log Disk Space on Exchange Servers
• Exchange 2010 FAQ: Are Wildcard SSL Certificates Supported?

This article New Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging Features is © 2009 ExchangeServerPro.com

Get more Exchange Server tips at ExchangeServerPro.com

One thing struck me during the Unified Messaging demonstrations.

• Exchange can read your email and calendar information to you over the phone
• Exchange can recognise your speech when you are doing things like looking up names in the directory, or when you are issuing commands such as having Exchange notify meeting attendees that you are running 10 minutes late
• Exchange can record voice messages and deliver them to mailboxes as audio files
• Exchange can’t (or doesn’t) record voice messages and deliver them to mailboxes in text format

The last one seems like a bit of an oversight to me.  If Exchange Server 2007 is capable of the first three, especially the voice recognition, it doesn’t seem to me like a huge leap to have it take a voice message and translate that into text using the same speech recognition engine that works so well for Outlook Voice Access and features such as Auto-Attendants.

This capability would have two immediate advantages for the end user:

• Voicemail messages can be read in scenarios where playback on the computer or telephone is not possible or practical
• Voicemail messages are delivered in text format for the hearing impaired 

It may mean more server resources are required, but in larger UM deployments you are already throwing a lot of CPU into the solution to handle the processing of voice commands and voicemail messages.  A little more CPU to translate audio to text might not be that big a deal to cater for what is usually (in my experience) only a few people who are going to require the functionality all of the time.

Maybe it could be set as a per-user option for HA people, and for everyone else appears as a “Translate to text” link in the voicemail item in Outlook.  Maybe it could even be delivered as an add-on for Outlook itself, which would avoid any load issues on the UM servers for this functionality.

Maybe there is already third party solutions out there.  If anyone knows about them please drop me a line or leave a comment.

Related posts:

• Should You Migrate from Exchange Server to Google Apps?
• Exclusively Exchange 2010 Interview and Demo Videos
• New Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging Features
• Whitepaper – Using Exchange Server 2007 for Unified Messaging and Fax

This article What is missing from Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging is © 2007 ExchangeServerPro.com

Get more Exchange Server tips at ExchangeServerPro.com

This technical white paper discusses how Microsoft IT designed and deployed an Exchange Server 2007–based unified messaging solution to support an increasingly mobile workforce with flexible and convenient access to voice mail, fax messages, calendar items, tasks, contact information, and e-mail messages in a single repository—the user’s mailbox.

Read on…

I’m currently staring down the barrel of a couple of UM deployments internally and for customers so if you are like me you might find this sort of information to be invaluable.

Related posts:

• Should You Migrate from Exchange Server to Google Apps?
• Get-MailboxReport.ps1 – PowerShell Script to Generate Mailbox Reports
• Update Rollup 6 for Exchange 2007 SP3 Released
• Error: Outlook Was Unable to Recover Some or All of the Items in this Folder
• Using Test-Mailflow with Exchange 2003 Servers

This article Whitepaper – Using Exchange Server 2007 for Unified Messaging and Fax is © 2007 ExchangeServerPro.com

Get more Exchange Server tips at ExchangeServerPro.com