hosting/collaborative infrastructure

Hello, all:

Sorry for any cross posting...
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The NY Hall of Science has gone through several iterations of email hosting solutions from large plain IMAP/POP hosts like Verizon to smaller Lotus Notes hosting services.  When Google premiered their Google Apps enterprise service last year, we gave it a good long look and decided to take the plunge.

Unlike the regular public gmail and calendar apps, you keep your own domain name (ie, your email is yourname@yourmuseum.org, and there are no ads as in public gmail.  Under Google Apps you also get administrative tools and live-person tech support for appointed admins.  For the full blown Google Apps enterprise system, you pay $5/user/month, which is about 1/10th the cost of a plain vanilla IMAP/POP provider, and much less than the cost of Notes/Exchange hosting.  Even more amazing, there is a version for education/nfp users that is free, though we chose to go with the full blown enterprise system.  There are two principal differences between the education users and the full enterprise system.  The first is that the enterprise user gets 25 gigs/person vs 7 gigs/person for the education.  The second and more compelling is that the enterprise user gets full blown state of the art top rated spam filtering from Postini for no extra cost.  The education user has to pay extra for that, or maybe it is not available.  And of course your data is backed up six ways from Sunday, with a distributed backup system that goes to several google data centers around the country. Finally, there is comprehensive online video training for users on virtually every aspect of using the system

The suite of google apps includes the familiar gmail (which can be used either on the web interface or through an imap/pop reader like outlook/os x mail) and google calendar.  It also integrates google docs, which is a web based document creation tool that can make M'soft compatible spreadsheets and documents that can be shared and collaboratively edited online or worked on offline.  Google Sites is a dead simple way of making collaborative work spaces/web sites. There is chat/video chat which works perfectly and turns out to be a great way to work quickly and efficiently with people both in and outside the museum.  There are several other collaborative tools included in the suite of apps that are either in development or in various stages of beta that I have not yet tried.

The transition from our current email system to Google went very smoothly, without a hitch.  And configuring our local mail readers was also problem-free.

One area of concern for some of our users is Google's reputation for data mining.  They have a comprehensive statement about this on their site.

All in all, it is an amazing deal, and has the potential to transform the kinds of tools available to small enterprises that can't afford a significant IT infrastructure.  There are other free or near free tools like Ning that we use for collaborative work, but I think that this integrated suite represents a new opportunity for museums to collaborate efficiently.  This approach to applications and hosting services is called "cloud computing," and it is growing rapidly as connectivity becomes more universal in workplaces and homes.

You can get a ton of information about this here http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html. Their web site is extremely informative, and their sales/tech support has been very responsive.  We have been using it for about a month, and it has been glitch-free, but your mileage may vary.

Glad to answer more specific questions on or off line, and many thanks to our VP for Technology, Steve Uzzo, for all the work he put into making this happen. And of course, we have no affiliation with google in any way.

Happy holidays, and smooth computing!

Eric Siegel
Director and Chief Content Officer
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Queens, NY 11368
(718) 699 - 0005 x 317
http://www.nyscience.org/
esiegel at nyscience dot org