I've been debating what I should do with my Exchange 2003 server. Because I run a college, I actually end up with a fairly decent size email server (over 1500 mailboxes) even though I have a small staff. When I look at everything I need to pay for each year (spam protection, antivirus, etc.) per mailbox, I cringe. The bill is higher than I can really afford. I also cannot offer the advanced services our students really want (lifetime email, larger inboxes, etc.). As a result, students don't use their mailboxes for much and yet I am stuck paying for services for them.
Enter Google Apps. Google allows me to, using my own domain name, host as many mailboxes on their servers using the GMail platform as I would like. Besides being able to give the students 6GB+ of email space and the ability to keep the address for life, they can also take advantage of most of the GMail features like document collaberation, IM, sites, calendars, and very good spam protection. The best part is that this is all FREE! I am actually going to move our staff and faculty over to the platform as well and dump my Exchange server all together. I can upgrade our staff to 25 GB of storage and email archiving for compliance purposes. Because we fall under the education umbrella, we also are allowed to hook up single sign-on capabilities directly to our Active Directory. All in all, Google has hit a homerun here with a quality product at a price I can afford.
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