I figure this is a good place to ask since I assume that most here are still self-hosting their Zimbra platforms. There is an initiative coming down here at my school, and I'm sure at other schools too, to consider moving email to Google Apps for Education (GAE).
Now GAE is more than just email of course. People see all the other Google goodies (especially unlimited Drive storage) that come with it and think it's awesome and will solve all that they think is wrong with our current email and storage offerings we provide locally. I don't necessarily disagree in theory. Google has some great tools and integrations, and from a sysadmins perspective there is something to be said for having somebody else worry about system uptime, storage, backups, and all that.
But....you're losing some stuff too...unless I'm understanding it incorrectly. The biggest issue for me is loss of local control of the data and the ability to do stuff with that data. There will be loss of some features like the ability to go in and pull messages from accounts when someone accidentally sends FERPA data to the wrong account....or pull spam messages from accounts. The ability to "View Mail" from the admin UI when troubleshooting account problems. I'm sure there are more features I would miss.
There are occasional stories of sites (a school in Chicago if I remember) that got blacklisted by some antispam site and then could no longer email any address out in the Google cloud for several days. And they couldn't get a support person at Google to help them out.
Anyway....I will eventually be asked to provide a list of pros and cons from a sysadmin perspective. If anyone has any direct experience with GAE, or has gone through this process, or has outright rejected going "to the cloud", I'd be interested in your thoughts and opinions.
Thanks,
Matt Mencel
Western Illinois University