Saas wants to be the way forward and it should be, but most of our SMBs recoil in horror when we tell them £x/m per user. Big corps just arent that interested in putting business critical apps in the cloud, mostly.

Loss of control again.  The great majority of IT Directors Ive had the misfortune to deal with love the idea of lower costs, but when you present them with the fact they cant really do anything when it breaks they go apesh*t.  Most of them like the fact they can ring a person they have actually met, and tell them that they must fix it now, and that it take priority, when youre just another customer of Google then youre just another sheep in the flock, and your response times will reflect that.

Sam is wrong in his understanding on all this, and opinion is off too. Exchange and like are used by the majority of large business and things like this need to work for it properly. Sam is correct in regard to the power of using google, Google apps for a business is great and with things like wave coming and the whole project management, time tracking and even greater google calendar support - Very powerful for business.
Beaker is right about what he is saying, but also does not have the right respect for the online solution. Beaker you do know Google has had less down time then the average internal system in these areas? If there is downtime it effects more people of course but it actually is less likely and you have the updates, upgrades, maintainability, cost (lack of) your end which is great.

A Well designed system doesnt HAVE downtime, the failovers take care of that.  Proper Big Business Setup is your primary clusters all tied in at your main datacentre.  Your failovers are then bolted to a differnet line, in a different location (Preferably on a different Telephone exchange, with a different power feed, and ideally in a different town).  Toed in to that is a decent IT team that doesnt just sit there on their fat arses and do as little as possible, while not caring if things get updated.  Plus, you dont even have downtime on the updates because you update one cluster and bring it online before you update the failover (While using the failover to take care of the primarys downtime).  That said, the largest company I ever worked for had ZERO failover in any form, and had a piss-poor backup system the likes of which the guy at my corner shop would be horrified if someone suggested he implement it.  

Individuals and Small businesses may benefit from SAAS and Cloud Computing, Enterprise Sized companies are just building up a world of hurt if they lose direct control of their IT Assets.  

Quote from: Sam

Ill let Temple University and the thousands of other businesses that use Googles Enterprise level Gmail that Beaker tells them theyre stupid. Ill get back to you on it.

go for it, be relinquishing control over your own systems is the height of stupidity.  Its done for cheapness, and you you lose the flexibility and control that you would otherwise have.  

Well at least at Temple university (35,000 students, all idiots) they voted and the majority wanted a gmail based system, since unlike exchange and outlook, its not 1980s era pants.

You see you have to understand that non techies couldnt care less about the underlying technology. You know you might be concerned with quadruple backups and what not, but the likes of me, well we just want it to work. Quickly. On our phones. On every computer. Work. Home. Campus. Do you expect a ton of students to "sync" their outlook at home so they can read emails from earlier? And I ask that as a genuine question - how can people read their work email from home using exchange and outlook?

Ive never used it. However Ill bet you a philly cheesestake that its pants compared to gmail.

Ive never used it. However Ill bet you a philly cheesestake that its pants compared to gmail.

its actually a lot slicker these days.  Until the last update they did to 2003 it was a bit crappy, but the latest versions are rather nice to use. Rather slick, and rather impressive.

TBH Exchange before 2003 was more effort than it was worth, from Exchange 2003 onwards its been rather cool.

Quote from: neXus

Quote from: Sam

Quote from: neXus

Sam is wrong in his understanding on all this, and opinion is off too..

How can ones opinion be wrong ?

It cant and that is why I did not say that it was. Your opinion is off not wrong.

You said I was wrong and that my opinion is often too

Sam is wrong in his understanding on all this, and opinion is off too

Been with Americans too long, before you know it you will start spelling Aluminum wrong too.