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Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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Hello, all:

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 [log in to unmask]), 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
www.nyscience.org
esiegel at nyscience dot org

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