Email solution for a small company

fogspark

I am looking at email solutions for a small company (< 100 employees in 2 locations). Exchange is kind of the standard but its a little expensive.

At first I was thinking google apps for business becasue it has 250g of space and could remove the need to have MS office on some of the machines, but it costs $50/user!

I guess there is always pop/smtp that comes with the web hosting provider but it would mean using the dreaded Open Office or buying 100 copies of MS office.

Any suggestions?

royal

Exchange Online:
http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-online.mspx

Want to host your own? SBS:
SBS 2008 Home Page

Don't forget you can always use OWA without Outlook. Depends on your needs.

bwcarty

Why not present the Google Apps option as costing just over $4 a month/user with no upfront hardware costs, no recurring backup costs, very little technical experience required to set it up, and no special disaster recovery requirements?

atenza

fogspark wrote: »

I am looking at email solutions for a small company (< 100 employees in 2 locations). Exchange is kind of the standard but its a little expensive.

At first I was thinking google apps for business becasue it has 250g of space and could remove the need to have MS office on some of the machines, but it costs $50/user!

I guess there is always pop/smtp that comes with the web hosting provider but it would mean using the dreaded Open Office or buying 100 copies of MS office.

Any suggestions?

I've been through a similar scenario but went with the web hosting because they were already paying for those email addresses so they might as well use them. I presented several different options, and that was the one that was chosen because they didn't have to pay any more than they already were. Why the need for Office just for email? Can't you just use Outlook Express/Windows Mail or any number of other free email clients? The email with the web hosting provider will likely have a web interface as well. If they also need Office for word processing and spreadsheets, then Google Apps might be the cheapest way to go if you didn't want to bother with Open Office.

L0gicB0mb508

Web hosting and cloud style apps have their pros and cons. Obviously you are trusting your data and communications to a third party. I do have Google apps set up on my domain and it is very slick and easy to use. If you do use a hosted provider make sure you do your research on reliability and customer service. Those are huge reasons to pick a provider. Google is touted to have what 99.9% uptime? That's pretty impressive. You may not even be able to get that kind of reliability from hosting your own server.

Me being the security nerd I am would much rather host my own. This is just a personal preference for me. If you don't have the staff, knowledge, or time to upkeep an Exchange server then you probably need to go hosted. Just some stuff to think about.

ally_uk

Setup your own get some old hardware, install Linux and invest in some good books plenty of information out there

disi

ally_uk wrote: »

Setup your own get some old hardware, install Linux and invest in some good books plenty of information out there

Many people actual do that and those are the mta's that forward all crap of spam and malware
If you run your own mailserver, you need something like spamassasin etc. set up this takes time and needs maintenance every day...

fogspark

I guess mail itself could just be done through the web hosting provider but the main reason I wanted to use Exchange or Google apps is becasue they have decent calendering functions for meetings etc.

Even Yahoo "zimbra" does this but I don't know of any standard calendering format that employees on a generic pop/smtp system can use.

IE. someone wants to invite people to a conf call, they add it to their calender and forward it out to people. Those people accept the invite and their calender will remind them before the call to get on it. It works and I think this is ~90% of the reason companies even bother paying for exchange.

dynamik

http://www.techexams.net/forums/off-topic/46937-hosted-email-recommendations.html