I’ve recently taken a job as Sys Admin at a company who are running IBM Domino/Notes 6.5. Now it was pretty much the talk that they wanted to migrate away from Domino to Exchange 2007 from day one. Of course we would continue to run BES, currently 4.1.
However now the guys in the Austin office have come up with the idea that we should be using Googles GMail Enterprise.
Would this invalidate having a BES server? Is there an advantage to using BES with Exchange vs just Gmail? Does anyone here use Enterprise GMail on their BB? Does anyone use the Google Sync for BB?
Does this sound like a bad idea to anyone else?
Right now I’m in favor of migrating to Exchange 2007.
is centralized management important?
you cant use bes with gmail.
have you looked at a functionality list of BES and compared it to what is offered with gmail?
If you have already shelled out for a BES, then there is most defiantly no point in loosing all the functionality that comes with it.
Apart from the big things such as IT Policies, security, accountability and device management, you've also got to think that gmail is pull email only, which means the BlackBerry is constantly polling to check for new mail, this will zap your battery power and have some impact on performance of the device.
you've also got to remember that you'll also have no ability to record mail activity (which is a requirement in a lot of business sectors these days).
The biggest thing I think you'll find different is just the pretty much seamless integration BES has with Domino and Exchange and the massive configurability options you have.
Our company looked at going to Google for enterprise mail and backed away. We've heard from their other Google customer basically saying Google doesn't provide enterprise level support. They have no SLA. If there's an outage they will would simply refund you the cost for that day.
Domino/Exchange vs Gmail and BES 4.1
