April 3rd, 2007
Should you switch your biz to Google's e-mail domain hosting service? We did
As the acting CIO of my own small business (Mass Events Labs, Inc.), I have to make real decisions regarding IT — often weighing the pros and cons of one approach against those of other approaches — and then having to live with those decisions.
Mass Events Labs is an event production company that, for the most part, runs unconferences (like Mashup Camp and Startup Camp) and one of the important aspects of unconferences is how the attendees get to update a central Web site with event content as that content "happens." The typical flow involves attendees determining before and during event time what the event's agenda will be, recording those agenda items on the event's Web site, and then, for each session/discussion, basically taking down the minutes of what was discussed. To get a sense of that flow, you can look at the Web site we run for Startup Camp.
First, there's the empty agenda, which is little more than a grid showing the available rooms and time slots. Then, in advance of the event, the attendees start to add ideas for topics to a proposed discussions page as they are now doing for Startup Camp 2 (coming up on May 7 in San Francisco). During a general assembly that's held on the morning of the first day of our unconference, attendees take turn at the microphone discussing their proposed topics and the grid is finalized. Here's what that grid looked like after the general assembly was held for the first Startup Camp. And finally, here's an example of the minutes that were recorded in real-time onto the Startup Camp Web site by someone who was present in the discussion.
There are three aspects of having Google do it for you that make the solution interesting.
As you can imagine, a bunch of IT decisions had to go into having this technology in place for the events. For example, wiki software is what makes it possible for multiple users to read and write to Web pages through their Web browsers. But which wiki software? And what operating system? And on what sorts of hardware? And how much do you invest in that hardware (or hosting service) to account for potential failures? And what do those choices cost? To acquire? To set up? To run over the long term.
As owners of a small company and as people with a limited amount of time to be worrying about things like hard drives failing, my partner and I agreed that even though it involved a premium, we'd go the managed hosting route. This is where physical systems that belong to someone else (the hosting outfit) are dedicated to you, but they're managed by the hosting company. If a hard drive fails on you, that's the hosting outfits' problem to get it fixed right away. Likewise, Internet connections to our servers are something I never have to worry about. In going with a managed hosting service, we were also afforded two choices for our e-mail domain (in other words, if the domain is masseventslabs.com, what e-mail server software ends up servicing in and outbound e-mails).
One choice was to run our own e-mail server software (I'm saying software so as not confuse it with some piece of hardware dedicated to e-mail) on one of the servers we're paying for under our managed hosting contract. The other choice from our managed hosting provider was to use their email servers instead — a service that comes for free with a managed hosting contract. It seems like a no-brainer, right? On one hand, I could run my own e-mail serving software on my own servers (taking up processor and storage resources) which will also net me the additional headaches associated with e-mail server administration. On the other hand, at no additional cost to me, I can take advantage of the e-mail service provided to me by the managed hoster. It didn't take more than about 2 seconds to decide: one second to think about it, the other to say "yes."
Using an outside service is not completely without its headaches. I of course had to walk users through how to configure their e-mail clients and make suggestions for things like leaving e-mail on the server or deleting it (and when). At one point, my personal inbox simply stopped working with no logical explanation. As it turns out,
