Speaking of Google apps, we recently did a comparison between Google Apps and Microsoft BPOS – http://www.hype...microsoft-bpos/

I mean 50 dollars a year for email and office is a lot to me. For 20 people that is 1000 dollars a year for something that is not essential in its benefits and advantages.

Whatever you may say, Google Apps Standard Edition is an extremely useful tool. We have implemented it for more than 750 clients. All seem to be happy about it (even after paying$99 to us for setup and for 12 months of technical support).

Our startup signed up for a Google Apps Premier Edition account two months ago but then realized that our original name and domain had a potential trademark issue so we changed our name and our primary domain. Turns out there is no way to do this with Google Apps. The documented suggestion? Sign up for a new Google Apps Premier Edition account and make sure that you turn off the auto-renew on your old Premier account. That is seriously what their documented solution was. This was a major slap in the face and meant that dozens of mailboxes, docs, wiki sites, etc. had to be transferred over to our new account. Did I mention that Google has great tools for migrating away from Microsoft products, but no tools at all for migrating from one Google Apps account to another. This all had to be done manually.

Countless hours of wasted time, not to mention the wasted dollars for two complete Google Apps Premier accounts and all of the requisite licenses.

We tried in vain for three days to get a real person from Google to either email or talk to us on the phone to give us support on this issue. We tried sales, thinking that they should give us a credit on our new account. We tried technical support, thinking that there’s got to be a better solution than this for the company that is “organizing the world’s data.” No go. Just automated and canned email responses. We had to ask ourselves, “and we pay for this service? Twice?”

The final insult? The old Google Apps Premier account can’t be cancelled so it won’t release our old domain until it expires next year. So rather than being able to do the sensible thing and add our old domain as a sub-domain to our new Premier account so that email will automatically be sent to the right email boxes – we now have to jimmy-rig each mailbox to auto-forward.

Brilliant.