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The entire US Department of the Interior (~71k employees) switched to gmail this year. It seems to have gone pretty well. The most common complaint I've heard is that gmail doesn't support the custom smiley faces that Lotus did.

The inbox size vastly increased (500MB => 30GB) which makes the record keeping much easier, just never delete anything. Before we had to empty our mail into offline archives.

Everyone still uses office for word processing and spreadsheets. The online storage is nice for sharing files though.

There will be disaster stories around for any big migration. I can't say I'm particularly enjoying my university's migration to Microsoft's email offering.

Exactly. There's a tendency to throw around bullets points of advantage (It's open! It's not big-bad Microsoft, but a company you can TRUST! etc) as if the things are enabled by flipping a switch or the ethics involved are far more important than bottom lines.

There are also some nice success stories around..what's your point? Lots of happy customers over 10k seats on Google Apps and Microsoft products.

I mean, you know, other than Google itself.

We do pretty well with a more or less entirely Google Apps workflow.