Creative and account. Agency and client. Partner and peon. When it comes to our priorities and preferences, the differences are many. And epic. But there’s one thing on which we can all agree: Google Apps makes our working lives better. At a basic level, Google Apps has been an improvement because it works well across Macs and PCs. We were previously using Exchange, and it just wasn't friendly to Macs. Actually, it was downright rude. Google Apps plays nicely with everyone. We also saw a significant cost savings, which made our partners happy. Hosted Exchange cost us quite a lot for email. The cost-per-user of Hosted Exchange was expensive for our growing business, compared to Google’s cost-per-user of $50. Beyond what’s already built in to Google Apps, we love the add-ons in the Google Apps Marketplace. We could shell out major chunks of change for existing software to get the robust functions we need, or bog down our developers and build them in-house. Instead, we get them from Marketplace. In fact, that’s the first place we look when we need something new. Bonus: The transition was painless. The team at Umzuzu, our Google Enterprise Partner, was very knowledgeable about the change management we’d need for a successful deployment, technical aspects of mail routing like DNS changes, and all of the other technical aspects involved in our environment. They helped us manage the entire migration process from Hosted Exchange to Google Apps and continue to support us when we have questions, help us learn about new features, and are always sharing tips and tricks. It couldn’t have been easier. Huzzah!

Our Mac users have always had a second-class experience on the Exchange server. In 2001 Microsoft released a Mac Outlook client, and for about two years we had an acceptable experience for the Mac users. For much of the last decade we made do with the limited functionality in Entourage. We were hopeful that Outlook 2011 would solve a lot of our issues. Outlook 2011 was better, but it still lacked the features that our PC users enjoyed. We had SharePoint running, but it didn’t play nicely with our Macs. Now we share project calendars directly with clients via Google Calendars. Project managers can do this themselves and don’t need assistance from IT to do so. Since Going Google, Barkley has added 30 additional staff and we just add the accounts. We don’t worry about mail clients, disk space, or what platform they’ll be on; Google Apps finally put us all on the same tools. On the Web, everyone (and device) is equal.