SALEM, Ore.-Oregon Employees FCU here is shedding the Microsoft mantle, opting for the "power of Google" for enterprise collaboration.
"There's nothing Microsoft Exchange can offer that we can't get through Google Enterprise," including secure e-mail, calendar sharing and documents, said Otto Radke, VP-IT at the $97-million CU.
In fact, Google delivers a lot more at a better price, Radke continued.
Employees can log in to Google Apps on the web to create and save one gigabyte's worth of documents. Documents can be edited online in real-time by any number of employees simultaneously.
Google Apps Marketplace offers thousands of business applications, including Postini and Smarsh, two apps that are critical for securing, archiving and recovering Oregon Employees (OEFCU) email, he said.
"And we recently used Google Forms to accept applications for a vacant board of directors position," Radke said. "We made the form public to the world so that anyone who wanted to apply could fill it out online and submit it."
The new board member was onboarded more quickly via Google Forms than board members who had joined in the past via a paper-based application process, he said.
The Google Enterprise license runs $50 per user annually, whereas Microsoft's cloud-based productivity suite, called Office 365, is $79 per user license annually, Radke said. Postini costs an additional $18 per user annually, he said.
"I evaluated Microsoft Office 365, and it was clunky and slow," Radke continued. "Google is super-fast. Plus, 365 didn't have the Marketplace applications, and I wasn't sure how the 365 data centers would be certified."
Google Apps is SSAE-16 certified, the latest data center standard. "There's some misconception about Google and their backend infrastructure. People think Google refuses to do certifications. Google is complying with guidelines that are important to credit unions," Radke said.
Google offers PIN and secure token authentication using a mobile device to fend off fraudsters, he added.
A Monitoring Approach
Not all OEFCU employees work with mobile devices, so Radke said he is taking a "monitoring approach" to Google App security.
"We use Google Analytics to watch IP addresses for everyone logging into our environment," he explained. "If they're outside of Oregon, that's a cause for concern. We're also running various antivirus and antispyware software."
Google Enterprise replaced Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in June, soon after Radke began working at OEFCU, he said. "We had no filtering at all on Exchange, so phishing was common, with up to 200 spam messages every day and frequent infection. Now, Google takes care of the filtering for us. E-mail is no longer a threat point, and I no longer have to buy, back up and maintain Exchange Server."
Google Apps delivers service-level agreements, email and telephone support, 25 gigabytes of email storage and a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, among other features, to each of OEFCU's 27 employees, Radke said.
Radke said he feels confident about Google. "I'd much rather rely on Google than on Microsoft. We're a small IT shop, so Google can bring up the Apps site faster than I could bring back Exchange if something goes wrong."
