Having been to Google's campus recently for a conference, and listening to their spiel on the large organizations switching to Google's services, I can say that I have a problem with the solution. At the conference, Google reps were repeat asked "What is in it for Google?" and they always hedged at the question. Are they aggregating reports on demographics (remember, university students are the most sought-after demographic of them all)? Are they throwing your email into search engines? Also, we need to ask questions about the viability of the service. Google dosen't make any money on the solution, they decide to phase it out, we are left holding the buck, again.
Google's apps, while neat are not very polished. They seem to work "OK," but are not of the caliber of other solutions available to the general public. Yes, it is nice that somebody else takes the reigns and manages the servers, the space, the data and the applications for you, but at what cost. As stated earlier in this thread, once you out-source these resources, it is very hard to go back.
An example of a similar solution... Early in the telephone days on campus, it was decided to contact with AT&T for their Central Office Centrex service instead of buying our own PBX like other universities (over the scape of the Universities similar to us, about 1/2 choose a hosted telephone service, while the other half choose to implement their own purchased solution). It was a good decision of our University to do that, as we didn't have the technical expertise or resources to implement something at the time. Now we are a slave to AT&T and their constant tariff increases, line charges, and other fine shenanigans. Migrating to our own solution it taking YEARS, and requires significant capitol out-lay. However, it is saving the university money, and allows us to control our services (for example, we no longer have to wait up to two weeks for a new phone line to be installed; out staff can do it in a matter of hours). In addition, we can offer advanced and customized services with little to no impact on existing users (such as SIP dialtone, Cellular Extensions, etc).
Boldness by design -- I see it as doing it right, this time and every time. Lets not take the cheap or easy way out.
-Nick Kwiatkowski
MSU Telecom Systems
Sorry if this is redundant, but doing my own research on this Google issue I ran across a YouTube video of Arizona States' head Information Technology Officer.
He's definitely singing Google's praises (the video is posted by Google) but he makes some solid points.
Here's the link if anyone is interested - I found it informative - it's a summary of how Arizona went about it and their perspective of why they switched and
how they feel they benefited- It's only 4 minutes long: