Well, that's slightly ironic. I've just read on NineMSN, an Australian news site that's 50% owned by Microsoft, that corporate workers are ditching their Exchange mailboxes in favor of auto-forwarding work emails to Gmail. The article notes that this trend could eventually make Exchange Server expendable.
Microsoft is responding by urging IT managers to upgrade to Exchange Server 2007, and give employees 2GB or larger mailboxes. (Google offers 2.7 GB.) Exchange 2007 features a 5,000 user capacity and 35x faster mailbox indexing than Exchange 2003. Also importantly, the not-yet-released Windows Mobile 6.0 will allow users to search Outlook folders on the server via mobile phones.
It looks like Intermedia.NET already offers Exchange 2007. The company says it will upgrade current Exchange 2003 customers at no cost. Its standard plans come with 1GB mailboxes though.
There's no Exchange 2007 info on groupSPARK's website just yet. The company offers 70 GB to 280 GB storage space for packages with 100 to 500 included licenses, which makes the average mailbox quite a bit smaller than Microsoft's recommended size.
SWSoft's PEM package is also Exchange 2003-only for now. While Intermedia.NET and groupSPARK offer 100% outsourced solutions, PEM lets you set up 12+ server (5000+ licenses) Exchange deployments on your own hardware.
I have to say, though, I'm not excited about the idea of web hosting providers reselling Exchange licenses while having to compete with Office Live for domain registration and web hosting customers.
PS - Jeff Nolan from Teqlo is planning to use Gmail as his company's corporate mail service: "We looked at each other and I asked everyone else in the room if they could think of a good reason why we should not just use Gmail for our mail server, and start using the Google Calendar as well, eyes darted around and nobody raised any objections or issues..." Jeff points out that SocialText is doing the same thing.
Strangely enough at Alert Logic, we had a reverse scenario. When the company was dominated by techies we set up an ultra-secure mail system that encrypted every bit of communication and was accessible from anywhere in the world. Once the sales team started growing they demanded shared calendaring capabilities and we had to install Exchange and restrict easy access to it to keep it secure.
Had there been a decent enterprise SaaS calendaring alternative that integrated with Outloook seamlessly we wouldn't have had to do that.
The killer for Goog would be what I call the "Google Outlook Toolbar". This would feature GMail and GCalendar integration with Outlook and allow calendar and address book sharing based on Google Apps for Domains. Thats the Exchange-Killer, IMHO. I think we'll see this in 2007.
1. Windows Live Mail (in beta since Nov 2005; seems intended as a Hotmail replacement?)
2. Windows Live Mail desktop (NOT the same as Live Mail, intended as a replacement for Outlook Express)
3. Email/calendar app within OfficeLive (paid version syncs with Outlook)
Businesses should be more concerned about this than individuals as they are under a much higher level of scrutiny.
Exchange has become the defacto email system because it offers users a great interface and a cost effective infrastructure. "Feature-Bloated" is a misused statement as those features are there because someone wanted them. Microsoft just needs to get better at helping customers manage those features to give them what they want with the level of level of complexity they can handle.
Yes I own a gmail account. Yes it is easy, but I use it to forward my emails to other accounts. I use it less and less because of the obvious issues with privacy.
"Feature-bloated" is relative. If a product contained 100% of the features that 100% of its users would like to have, it would inevitably seem cluttered to at least 99% of the population :)
I think Gmail has taken off because it's taken a lowest common denominator approach. I've read similar comments about Excel vs Google Spreadsheets.
As for privacy, should it be a concern? Absolutely. But is Google the only threat? Or should we worry about Office Live as well? And Yahoo Mail. And thousands of other hosted services. Not to mention companies that collect and analyze clickstreams. Microsoft's adCenter, for one, offers data that correlates search behavior with demographic background. And by the way, did you know that MIT researchers can predict your schedule for this afternoon with 76% accuracy by running your cellphone history through its statistical model?
I'm way more worried about incidents like AOL's search database leak than any company's evil intentions. If companies want to market to you (which they all do), it's in their best interest to remain within somewhat reasonable boundaries. I recently read that 35% of Amazon's sales result from its recommendation system. In which case, it might be more profitable for companies to advertise to you than take advantage of your proprietary data.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaste...
A Google rep responds in the comments to say this happened to about 60 accounts, and that the company will "work with them to restore the email from any personal backup they might have." Which suggests that Google itself has no backup. Not good.
http://gigaom.com/2006/12/28/mom-google-ate-my-gma...
Not good indeed. I guess this is why we need something like Cleversafe (http://www.cleversafe.com). You can't count on any individual service provider to never screw up. But if your data is encrypted and dispersed across multiple companies and locations, nobody will be able to lose it.