IT directors for both organizations say they took a risk in deploying Google Apps in 2008, and learning curves aside, they have no regrets about the move. Neither organization misses paying for upgrades or managing servers. And even older employees who were tied to Outlook or Lotus Notes for decades have adjusted to using Gmail and working on documents within a browser and saving them to the cloud.

But managing the docs after they had been saved in Google Docs proved to be a cumbersome process, says Panama City Network Administrator Richard Ferrick.

"I needed to view all the documents stored in Google Docs and get data on who they belong to, who else that person has shared the docs with and whether they were shared internally or outside our domain," says Ferrick. "I couldn't do that with Google Docs. I would have to log in as each person and see what was there."

Panama City, which has been using GAPE ($50 per user per year) since 2009, came to the cloud service after using Lotus Notes and an ancient Domino server for too long, says Ferrick.