May 19, 2011, 5:27 PM — For many organizations, the choice between Microsoft Office and Google Apps involves myriad considerations, including costs, software quality, customer support, and the leap of faith required to entrust your data to a Web-based service.
But for Joe Moran, head of IT at the nonprofit Quality Services for the Autism Community in New York, the impetus for moving from Microsoft to Google was relatively straightforward.
"There were higher-level people in our organization who hated Outlook," he says of the Microsoft email software that connects to Exchange servers. "So the top priority was to find another email client."
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QSAC, to be fair, was using the 2003 version of Outlook, practically ancient in the fast-moving world of technology. But given the organization's budget and the needs of its users, paying to upgrade to a newer version or selecting another expensive software product to be deployed and managed in-house didn't make sense.
"I had been fond of Google services for my own personal use, so I brought it to the executive staff, and they were open to it, especially because it's free," Moran says. "We were able to get our mail off of our servers, so we wouldn't have to maintain our physical servers anymore. It was either spend money to upgrade or we move to a new solution. At that point, moving to a Web-based solution made sense."
Although the standard Google Apps for business contracts cost $50 per user per year, QSAC's nonprofit status makes the organization eligible for free service.
Moran is happy with the switch overall, but says Google support leaves something to be desired. Phone support is only available for "emergencies," which Google defines as involving more than half of a company's users.
QSAC has suffered "little spurts of downtime here and there that affects a subset of our users," sometimes preventing access to Gmail or Google Calendar, Moran says.
"It's a little frustrating not having someone to call immediately," he says. "We have to resort to going to the help forums and submitting a ticket. But they're usually good about getting back within 24 to 48 hours. Depending on the issue it can be really aggravating."
QSAC's employees "call and want us to fix it and we can't," he adds. "We say, 'We hope Google's working on it.' Typically, it comes back within a few hours." (Also see: "Google plans expanded 24/7 phone support ... but not just yet")
As director of communications and technology, Moran handles not only IT but also QSAC's marketing and branding. The organization has 1,000 employees across 20 locations around New York City, but only about 300 email accounts, with most users on Windows XP. The nonprofit switched to Google last summer, rolling it out one department at a time while using the Google Email Uploader to move email from Outlook, and moving users from Internet Explorer 8 to Google Chrome. Moran figured Google would be able to support its own products on Chrome better than it could on rival browsers.
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"I'm a Web designer. Internet Explorer has been a nightmare for me, for a number of reasons," Moran says. "In addition, a lot of features in Gmail were missing in IE, and the weirdest part was a lot of the scroll bars were missing, so users couldn't scroll through their contact lists."
That doesn't mean Google products offer all the features Moran wants, even on Chrome. Google has improved over time, for example adding email delegation so assistants can manage their bosses' email, Moran says. But other features are absent.
"The biggest piece that's missing right now is a full-featured global address list," Moran says. "It's functional, but there's no real easy way for employees to share groups of contacts, aside from manually exporting and importing them." This is a headache especially for email addresses that are outside the QSAC domain, he says.
