Always think twice before you trust funded research...
...check first who funded itt. :)
We all have enough scars to remember that when it comes to core email and office productivity capabilities, migrations are never as easy as they seem. So when SaaS vendors claim that they can magically make things cheaper and simpler we know that it may not be quite that smooth in practice. So what's the real deal when it comes …
SaaS makes sense for small biz email, since the internet for the SaaS service is more likely to be up than the small biz. However, I've worked with businesses that utilized SaaS email (most of them just didn't pick the right one) which ended up with a POP3-type service and thought they were good to go because it "worked." At least, until the first computer died. Switching them to a local Exchange server gave them additional functionality, as well as reduced internet load (due to those favorite 4MB attachments not going outside the org anymore).
As the software stack goes up and becomes more complex (real-time links to databases for instance) the performance just gets worse and worse. This is most painfully noticed on software that was designed to run on LANs, but is getting shoe-horned into a "Cloud" server because it looked cheaper on paper. Of course, SaaS like a timecard system or modern web-based software makes more sense. Still, depending on the implementation or data load, it can be lethargically slow. Short of having a P2P T1 (or better) to the SaaS provider, your experience will be at the mercy of your ISP.
Sort out the technical solutions from the pragmatic ones.
One organisation i know has switched to Yahoo webmail because it is free (provided they endure the ad based webmail service) and beats Outlook 2000 or 2003 that they paid for (I hope).
Why bother with humungous technical solutions when a simple webmail workaround works oh so very well and when the boss asks: how much did it cost?
Ans: free (smile & blush)
Besides the staff never could manage folders in Outlook (IMAP or POP confusions amongst the teknikal illiterati?) but Yahoo's do so very well and nothing gets lost and everybody can be logged in to same account at the same time.
Great! Good young Yahoo?
"Hopefully they never have to send anything confidential to each other via email then."
Build a bullet proof private server, locked down, patched and impenetrable to protect all those 'confidential' documents that are being emailed in and out of your users' accounts completely unencrypted.
I just don't get the logic really.
If you're sending mails plain text, then the info is going 'out there' anyway... does it really matter if your mail is in Google Hosted Mail? Do you think it is more likely to be leaked or misappropriated from there than it is en route across the interweb?
Of course, if you're encrypting attachments, then these cannot be read en route. But if you're encrypting attachments, then Google Hosted mail or whatever cloud provider you use cannot read them either can it?