Why does any business favor PCs and local applications and processing over database like solutions?
Why don't they trust web email as much as they do wireless phone service?

Server based email (or any application where latency, accessibility, and processing power are sufficient has so many advantages over desktop apps it becomes a no brainer.

Email in business is the first layer of its ERP capabilities, just for some reason companies have been blinded to that, perhaps by PC computing models vs. graphical mainframe.

In addition to server (web) based email, many companies need to have their traveling folks equiped with PC-based email to work on email while offline, e.g., while on an airplane. Airlines offering online services may change that just as hotels and airports have.

Many people, including Ted Schadler it seems, underestimate the cost of Cloud based e-mail solutions, they need to think about:-

- The cost of communicating the change and training users for the move from Outlook to Gmail. (What do they do with their forms, surveys etc.)

- The impact on productivity and user frustration connected with latency problems of the, now web based, user interface. (Google gears may help in future and the quality of the training you give them)

- Increase internet traffic and the cost to upgrade your connection.

- Linking your company LDAP to Google requires API's, once you have developed these they need to be maintained etc.

- PST file ingestion is something your IT support will have to perform using the tools available from Google.

- If you have a Blackberry Server Google doesn't link up with it (yet?) so your users will be stuck with pop access and not push e-mail. (Microsoft won't give you a Blackberry Server unless you have more than 20,000 users)

- Both Google and Microsoft price on a per mailbox/ user account not on a per employee basis. Depending on the company a 5000 user estate may have another 1000 mailboxes for Internal teams, Marketing, Meeting Rooms etc.

- Microsoft's Licensing policy for their hosted solution requires that the customer purchase Software Assurance even if they already own Exchange 2007 and Office licenses.

- Microsoft demand that you upgrade your clients to Outlook 2007, where as if you upgraded your own Exchange servers to 2007 your clients could remain on Office 2003.

I found that building a new Exchange 2007 environment and having the feature rich product (in one case this included an e-mail archive solution with enough space for 10 years of data) is around $3 per user per month more expensive than Google. Microsoft Online was $2 more expensive than Google.

PS - I think Ted's $20.32 price for Microsoft online included more than exchange (i.e. SharePoint, Live Meeting, OCS…) as you would get Google's competitor to these with the Google price whether you wanted them or not. My '$2 more expensive' quote above only included Microsoft Exchange Online.

I can see the value of cost savings in moving to web based email service, but companies also have to factor in the potential damage to overall functionality should an outage occur. So much business is done via email now that having an issue arise (such as Google's recent gmail issues - my personal gmail account was down every morning for nearly a week) could grind business to a halt while the company waits helplessly for someone else to figure out and resolve the issue. Email functionality is too critical of an issue to not consider this element of handing the management of those services to a third party.

I think it would be helpful to find out why there isn't more interest among corporate IT in moving towards cloud mail.