Business email Featured solution #2

There are many cheap or free email options available from vendors such as Google, Yahoo, and GoDaddy. While free is certainly attractive, we feel that there are a few key features that is worth paying for with business email.

Top 5 Features

• 1. Collaboration - This is the number one feature that businesses ask for. Share email, contacts, and calendar with your sales team or management staff to collaborate on projects.
• 2. Mobility -Your email should not be tied down to one computer. Look for the ability to access emails from work, home, or from the road with Outlook, web browser, or Blackberry.
• 3. Central storage - Everyone's email should be stored on a server where it can be retrieved at a later time. (i.e. When a employee leaves the company.)
• 4. Ample space - Most free email services limit your mailbox size to a few hundred megabytes. With most businesses using email as a primary source of record keeping, you should have enough space to accommodate a year's worth of emails.
• 5. Outlook integration - Outlook is the email program for business. Most office workers are trained on Outlook and expect to be able to utilize its common features, such as Out of Office Reply. The full functionality of Outlook is unlocked only when paired with a Microsoft Exchange Server.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the central hub for all your emails, contacts, and calendars. It is what makes sharing information possible with Outlook. In the past, however, Exchange was typically considered too costly for small businesses to implement.

With the rise of cloud-computing, Microsoft has responded in a big way by introducing Hosted Exchange from Microsoft Online Services. What was once a system that cost upwards $20,000 every 5 years (see pricing table below), Hosted Exchange can be purchased for as little as $5/user as a monthly service.

What if I already own Exchange?

We recommend clients with existing Exchange servers to transition over to Hosted Exchange during the next technology refresh. Technology refresh should occur every 5 years to coincide with the expiration of the server warranty. When you calculate the cost of the new server and its components over a 5 year period, the case becomes clear that Hosted Exchange is the far more cost effective option.

5 Year Total Cost of Ownership (15 users)

Hosted Exchange		On-premise Exchange
15 users x $5/mo x 5 years	$4,500	Exchange 2010	$684
		Exchange 2010 user license $69.78/user x 15	$1,047
		Windows Server 2008 R2	$701
		Windows user license $32.85/user x 15	$493
		Dell T410 Server	$3,500
		Setup Labor	$2,125
		Maintenance Labor $185/mo	$11,100
		MX Logic spam filtering $2.25/user/mo	$2,025
Total Cost of Ownership	$4,500	Total Cost of Ownership	$21,675

 

What about Google Apps?

If you have been keeping up with technology news, you might have noticed lately that Google Apps is making headlines as the new kid on the block. Our experience with Google Apps, however, has been lukewarm. Google charges $50/user/yr for 25Gb storage compared to $60/user/year from Microsoft. In return for the modest cost savings, Google Apps comes up short on a few features, such as tasks and memos.

While missing such lesser features might not be a deal breaker, we feel that it is worth paying a little extra for Outlook to "work the way you would expect."