"It's working out great," Renzi said. "There are of course things that we have that we have to change," including some work processes, but those adjustments are expected and are being made. "The faculty is getting really enthused about it."

Renzi said he's not sure how much money the free services are saving the college, but "there's no question that it's saved thousands of dollars."

Paul Sculthorpe, a senior Web developer at Rock Kitchen Harris, a 20-person advertising and design company in Leicester, England, said in an e-mail that his company began using Google Apps several weeks ago when its internal mail server died. The company has been using the services for POP3 e-mail, although some users prefer the Web-based interface of Gmail.

In addition to its free use, the big gain so far, he said, is that it's "painless to set up and means we can get on with other things (i.e. earning money!). We were up and running in literally minutes."

The company has always done its own IT services internally to save money. The Google Apps package fits the company well, Sculthorpe said. "We're small, so we don't have an Exchange server or anything like that. We use Google Apps shared calendars -- very handy."