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"I helped a friend setup his church with Google Apps, and it was pretty painless to setup. There is a pretty clear step-by-step guide on working with your DNS settings to get it working properly. I too fall into the category of Google-love. The shared event calendar is a great feature for churches (or like organizations)." -- comment left by Jason

"For a small church, this may be a cost-effective means of getting one's message out rather nicely ... with the ability to integrate many of Google's free services. " -- comment left by Mean Dean

"I would like to encourage you to move your church to Google Apps. It takes a some time to learn but there is plenty of documentation from Google if you are willing to read it. Or you could outsource the setup (takes a pro just a few hours to do).

Where else can you get enterprise email, calendar and docs with plenty of storage and data backup for free? Say goodbye to Microsoft Exchange and Office and all the related costs and headaches. Switch to Google Apps Today!!! " -- comment left by Eric, www.23flavors.com

"I’ve helped 3 churches make this transition and each one has has their joys and gripes. I also went down the personal domain route and “converted” my wife and kids over to Google Apps." -- comment left by wvpv, sprignaturemoves.com/blog

"Google Apps has so many benefits especially for small churches who can’t afford other solutions. We’ve been using it for some time now and it works wonderfully. It provides our power users with an awesome webmail and calendaring experience with mobile device support and our less tech-savy users just use Outlook and don’t know the difference. We’re even beginning to use the Google Calendar API for our next website to pull event information from a Google Calendar and post it to our Special Events page on our website.

Also, make sure you check out the Push Calendar and Push Contacts support that they’ve added for phone’s that support Exchange, its pretty snazzy too!" -- comment left by Mark Adams, @markadams

"Our church switched to Google Apps over a year ago and have had a lot of success with it. As the technical arts director the maintenance time I spend with Google Apps is nothing in comparison to Exchange. We have had very little downtime with Google Apps. It can be frustrating when there is downtime because you have no control over the resolution of the issues, but you must rest assured that Google is a competent company who is out there working to get the issue resolved. Our ministry teams use the calendar and collaboration through google docs. I would recommend Google Apps." -- comment left by Jeremy Denlinger

"We switched to Google Apps in July and love it! We’re a small-mid sized church (400) and were using just hosted pop email and didn’t have any kind of shared calendaring. Now we have shared calendars, but what has been even more powerful are the online docs. We put all of our important documents out there and during meetings we can all have the document up and work on it together, we can all see changes each other is making as they’re being made. We use it to track task lists for projects, develop series treatments, and are starting to look at the dashboard features for data analysis and dissemination. It’s amazing what all is offered for free. The switchover went smoother than I thought it would. I highly recommend it for any sized church." -- comment left by Paul Sims

"Our church uses Google Apps. Through Google Apps we’re able to offer email, instant messaging, and calendar accounts on our own domain name (@lafayettenaz.org). In my opinion, the email and calendar programs are some of the best available.

Best of all, if your organization is a registered non-profit Google offers their education edition of Google Apps for FREE.

We use Google Apps in a variety of ways. Some standard – email, calendar, etc. But we also use it to aid in collaboration.

One example; I’m convinced that worship planning benefits through the power of a collaborative team where ideas can be exchanged and refined. The normal paradigm for facilitating that effort would be a face to face meeting. Or perhaps a Word document that is forwarded via email. Or maybe even a group email string.

We have started to use Google Documents to facilitate those conversations. A Google Document allows for multiple collaborators, changes saved in real time and available for all collaborators to see, commenting, and much more." - Troy H., To Will One Thing