Those of you who live in Brooklyn should really try out that restaurant above. It’s a real treat and in the summer you can eat outside in the garden behind the restaurant. It used to be called Little Dishes until some restaurant in Manhattan enforced it’s trademark (grrr! hiss! boo!). I’ve done it before, and I’m doing it again, and I’m naming this post in Little D’s honor.
A few little dishes for the weekend:
As of yesterday, Google is offering nonprofits Google Apps Education Edition for free. This turns the world upside down for nonprofit system administrators. I’ve changed the Leaderboard to reflect my new recommendation for enterprise e-mail services for small nonprofits. Yup, Gmail for Domains is the ultimate Exchange killer for nonprofits. Microsoft can’t keep its hold on enterprise e-mail forever and Gmail is going to loosen that grip. I use it, I live by it, I swear by it, it’s time to migrate. And speaking of migration, check out Ltech Consulting. They’re hoping to help you with that migration.
What’s the ROI for larger orgs with lots of e-mail? Add the cost of the Exchange server plus file backups plus the cost of administration (licenses and administrator time) and your anti-spam software (and the cost of administering that!). If that cost over three years is greater than the Ltech Consulting migration plus some extra bandwidth to handle the possible load of getting your e-mail over the Web, I would seriously consider it. Frankly, the cost of extra bandwidth is always dropping. Of course, those of you heavily involved in using all the little gewgaws of Office (public folders, shared calendars and the like) may want to do some extra review but after having had to use Outlook for years, I have to say I greatly prefer Gmail in terms of user experience and accessibility. Believe it or not, it’s easier to make it sync with Windows Mobile devices in some respects but it doesn’t have the cool direct push capability of Exchange but that’s not a real showstopper in my book.
I have a suspicion that NTEN had something do with this as the announcement was made during the NTEN mixer at Google. If NTEN even had a tiny role to play, I still have to give a lot of credit to NTEN for pulling it off. Kudos to Katrin and Holly!
Kintera picked up 28 votes on 7/13 in the CRM poll. That’s a huge number for one day. Someone really tried to spam the poll — 85 visits in one day??? Add that to Kintera’s stock growth in the last month (something like 30%) and the constant chatter on Yahoo! Finance about KNTA and I can’t tell whether it’s enthusiasm or cynical manipulation (or both).
Also, we hit 4,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days. Thanks to all the people who’ve always been around and welcome to all the new visitors too! This week has been the most heavily trafficked so far for the Non-Profit Tech Blog. Yay!
Oops! One last thing — I’m going to be in Boston next Tuesday. If you’re around, e-mail me at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org. I love to meet readers (all 4,000 of you!)
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umm…any suggestions as to what to order in the eatery? and where is it exactly?
nevermind the 2nd question, i got it.
I have Google Apps for a personal domain, but have really only been using the e-mail, and just for me so far.
But how’s Google for booking resources, like conference rooms? That’s something that we really rely on.
Sorry for the late reply. In the case of conference rooms or any kind of shared resource, you would assign a specific user like “conference room 1″ to a conference room and share that calendar to everyone.
That’s not too much different from the way Exchange does it. The real weakness right now in Google Mail is shared contacts. You can’t easily share contacts from one user to another without doing some tricky administration.