The idea is simple, you tell google that you want a new Google Apps account, you tell them your domain name, the user accounts you want and they tell you to point your mx records at them, you can even set up a CNAME (mail.yourdomain.com) so you and your customers/employees/friends don’t have to remember the mail.gmail.com/a/yourdomain.com. As soon as the MX Records are transfered you are ready to go. Here are some points (good and bad) I considered before switching:

• Massive Storage
  The main selling point of gmail is never having to delete a single email, this is rather handy when you’re using it for a business where emails from a year ago can often become relevant today.
• IMAP and POP3
  This means you can use mail clients like outlook and thunderbird, you can also use it to transfer all of your emails from one gmail account to another, all of your mails can be left on the server just archived for you to pick up at any time. The only problem with the service is that there is no unsecure IMAP/POP3 available and some clients don’t support that.
• Secure Mail
  Whether you get it over the web or through IMAP/POP3, its nice to know that you can send information without it getting picked up by someone it wasn’t intended for. Rather handy from a business perspective for passwords to servers and the like
• Google Ads and Information Security
  It was starting to look too good to be true, here is the one major issue for a lot of people about google. They reserve the right to do whatever they like with your information. For me their actions speak louder than words, they have only used the information to put those subtle ads on the screen which unlike hotmail don’t appear at the bottom of every message you send.
• Spam Protection
  These days I don’t tend to bother much checking my spam mail, if someone notices I haven’t replied the spam remains there for 30 days and I can spot it there. In the 3 years I’ve had one person complain about getting caught by the gmail spam filter.
• Google Docs
  Whether I’m viewing a pdf/Word Doc/rtf/whatever someone has sent me its nice to be able to hit view and have the html version openned up much quicker than my machine can load up adobe reader, download the latest unnecessary update and eventually show me the document.
• Google Chat
  If you are adding multiple people to your domain they are automatically added to your google chat contact list which runs in your browser everytime you start the webmail. You don’t have to download a client although its just jabber so you can connect with most IM clients that cover more
• Zero Downtime
  I’ve yet to see any downtime, which is understandable because think of the vast amount of revenue the google would lose from advertising for every second of downtime.
• Easy to use interface
  Its simple, it makes sense, its quick and it doesn’t require some particular browser or plugin to make it work.

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