I just Googled "using google apps" and came up with 44,200,000 results. There are a lot of articles explaining how good Google Apps is and then there were also many warning against using it.

In todays environment where Cloud Computing is the new child on the block you would think that people would be looking much more seriously at such options as Google Apps. Google certainly make it easy to throw everything into the cloud.... but what are the guarantees of it being safe from data lose and remaining forever private to the people who set it up?

There are horror stories around of people loosing their data which brings the questions of backups. Can you put all your documents on Google and then throw away your office file server? Common sense say no, you need to make sure you have a back up strategy (yea, we know we always need this, don't we?).

I can see it is great for sharing, colaberative editing and getting hold of documents from anywhere (VPNs are slow but is it any faster via Google?). Gmail is a great email service and of course the magic of shared calendars etc.

I've setup Google Apps for some customers and over all they are happy with it. It has some limitations, especially when working with older systems like being able to use a tradition mailing list (rather than google groups which just does not do the same thing). It also lakes support for being able to create aliases for clients who do not have a google mailbox but there are workarounds which are really a bit ugly.

Another customer is changing over next week, so be interesting to see their experience.