Google Apps For Your Domain

[Bookmage]

Anyone with the older 50user limit Gmail App know if you can transfer/replace that with a new domain? ie had www.coolwebsite.com on the older 50 user limit and wanna swap it to www.newcoolerwebsite.com ? Or would that require a new signup w/the 10 user limit?

 

[Mercutio]

You can add aliases to an existing domain. That's completely valid. Several of my customers have done that in order to claim domain names in the various new TLDs that have come along in the last couple years.

 

[Mercutio]

As of last Friday, it is no longer possible to register for Google Apps for Domains as a free service. Existing domains are not impacted, but any new domain will be billed at $65 per user account per year.

 

[Handruin]

As of last Friday, it is no longer possible to register for Google Apps for Domains as a free service. Existing domains are not impacted, but any new domain will be billed at $65 per user account per year.

Will existing users eventually be billed the $65?

 

[ddrueding]

Not according to the current announcement. Unless they make further changes we are still in for free. I even got many domains in when free was 25 users

And my paid accounts are being charged @ $50/user/year currently.

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I pay for extra storage, so if they rolled that into the $50 and gave me more than one user maybe I'd pay. I only need 4 users but 10 for $50/year is more like it for a non-business.

 

[LunarMist]

So the Google was providing this service for free as a loss leader and now is charging? That is like when the pussier gives out free drugs at first to create the addiction.

 

[sdbardwick]

First taste is free?

 

[LunarMist]

As of last Friday, it is no longer possible to register for Google Apps for Domains as a free service. Existing domains are not impacted, but any new domain will be billed at $65 per user account per year.

So if a typical company has 10,000 users, is $650,000 a reasonable cost per annum?

 

[ddrueding]

At some scale it becomes cheaper to run in-house, but some things Google will always be better at.

1. SPAM detection (largest sample size, largest man-hour investment)
2. AV (same reasoning)
3. Uptime (multiple datacenters, distributed storage, etc)

 

[timwhit]

So if a typical company has 10,000 users, is $650,000 a reasonable cost per annum?

For a userbase of that size Google may be willing to negotiate on the price.

 

[Handruin]

So if a typical company has 10,000 users, is $650,000 a reasonable cost per annum?

Well, maybe...what would it cost in servers, storage, backups, software licenses, AV licenses, anti-spam licenses, and most importantly a competent staff to manage all of it? I don't know the full workings of something like Microsoft exchange, but I believe each account needs a single user CAL. CDW sells each CAL for $39.99 and that doesn't include the price of Exchange. That already puts you at $399,900 in user licensing. There may be some discounts for bulk...but you get the idea. Then if you hire two people around $75K/year you're getting pretty close to Google's cost and we haven't even discussed proper servers, storage, backups, facility space, electricity, generators, etc.

 

[Howell]

Handy, many of the costs you mention should be amortized over multiple years. Some people still have exchange 2003 in service.

 

[Handruin]

Handy, many of the costs you mention should be amortized over multiple years. Some people still have exchange 2003 in service.

True, good point. I admit I didn't spend a ton of time breaking down the numbers for things like that. Maybe Google really is just expensive for large corporations unless if large-quantity discounts cannot be obtained. There is also the unrealized cost of Google having all of your company's data vs keeping it in-house.

 

[MaxBurn]

I still have problems imagining a business using google products for their sensitive data. Mine even shut me down in organizing a shared calendar for scheduling on google, so rather than be able to work with this calendar on mobile devices or just plain out of the office without VPN they said no need to see the calendar. This is the calendar we use to schedule people out of the office to ensure in office coverage. When my boss is out of the office he has zero idea where people are and it shows.

 

[ddrueding]

I suppose it depends on your definition of sensitive. My company is completely OK with data being on the web, knowing that competitors will have just as hard a time breaking into Google as into a local exchange server (guessing passwords). The government will get in with a court order anyway. Who else are you trying to keep out?

 

[MaxBurn]

Maybe I'm missing something, are these paid business accounts exempt from the data mining that google does for personal accounts? If so than perfectly OK, just another place to outsource that type of thing. If not they were at the level of predicting pregnancies by data mining for something as mundane as advertising.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm sure they are also subject to some level of data mining. But what would my company care? Does anyone who has access to the un-anonomized data care about construction in central California? And once it is filtered and aggregated it doesn't matter anymore.

 

[MaxBurn]

We do too much business with banks and government agencies for this to even be considered. Plenty of sites we work with do independent background checks on everyone that enters the facility. Lets say you are involved in construction with an NSA datacenter...

Also much of the documentation I handle is under NDA.

 

[Howell]

More changes afoot:

http://www.slashgear.com/google-ousting-sync-support-on-january-30-14261037/

 

[ddrueding]

The Google App has worked so much better than the rest for so long I don't know anyone that is using anything else.

 

[Mercutio]

That is... interesting. As far as I know, there's no support in Outlook for CalDev/CardDev. I'm guessing there's a commercial addon someplace, but for as much as I hate it plenty of business systems live and die with Outlook integration.

This blows.

 

[LunarMist]

We do too much business with banks and government agencies for this to even be considered. Plenty of sites we work with do independent background checks on everyone that enters the facility. Lets say you are involved in construction with an NSA datacenter...

Also much of the documentation I handle is under NDA.

I am in a similar boat, in the US and elsewhere. Many international companies and governments take a dim view of Google anything, much less for compliance with government-mandated security and privacy regulations.