Google Apps is now monetizing itself…  I knew it couldn’t be FREE forever!  Here comes the beginning of the end of Gmail with your own domain I think…

More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses

via Official Google Blog: Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace.

As Chevy Chase once said… “this is crazy… this is crazy…” before he hopped into a pool with Christie Brinkley in Vacation… impossible things only sound crazy… kind of like this story… but I have done similar things to this but in a much smaller scale as I only work with small businesses… but switching over 40 email accounts to google apps at once sounds a little scary but simply works beautifully if you dot all of your i’s and cross all of your t’s correctly with a checklist before hand… I highly recommend all of my clients get on the Google Apps for their domain email system.  You will be happy you did!

As we delved deeper into our migration planning and learned from our early adopters, we realized that we would be better off using a big bang approach. One major reason is that getting everyone onto a single system faster reduces the largest pain of having co-existence of two systems for any amount of time.

via Official Google Enterprise Blog: JohnsonDiversey: migrating 12,000+ users from Lotus Notes/ Domino to Google Apps in 48 hours.