"Surprise" Upgrade to 25GB

Evidently it was actually announced back in late June, but since I wasn't subscribed to the blog's updates, I didn't know about it. It was certainly a pleasant surprise this morning to find out that our mailbox quotas just went even higher: from 7 GB to 25 GB!

Our employees' mailbox quotas on Exchange are a paltry 175 MB. If this transition was anything less than a "slam dunk" decision before, it certainly is one now.

I've posted the following announcement to Griffin's Lair (our intranet portal) after having a little fun with the Google Apps reporting capabilities.

Mailbox Stats - Gmail vs. Exchange

Charts:

• Mailbox Quotas: Gmail vs. Exchange

• Gmail Mailbox Utilization

• Distribution of Gmail Employees Grouped by Mailbox Utilization

Don't Forget:

• Gmail's mailbox quota is over 145 times the default employee mailbox quota on Exchange.

• Gmail (as a part of Google Apps) had a 99.984% uptime rate throughout 2010, and is on track to hit 99.99% uptime this year.

• There are 209 employees and 3,771 student accounts on Gmail.

Fun Facts:

• The average employee on Gmail uses only 1.04% of the allotted quota (median: 0.32%).

• The average student on Gmail uses only 0.14% of the allotted quota (median: 0.07%).

• The total space available (for our current amount of users) is 80.9 TB.

• Despite such low usage rates, these numbers are actually inflated in comparison to Exchange users because many Gmail users upload years of archives previously kept on their local machines (and we recommend it!).

• Over 350 documents have been created or uploaded using Google Docs.

• If we decided to consolidate the contents of all ~4000 mailboxes into as few as possible, we could fit it all into just eight mailboxes. That's quite a bit of "breathing room!"

Did you see that last statistic? It's tough to believe, but that's how big of a step we're taking from an on-premise Exchange solution to Google Apps.