In my last job, I headed up a very talented team that spent a huge part of their time trying to support small business users with Exchange and Outlook as their mail platform. So, when I was asked to "fix our mail and calendar issues" at my new gig the first thing I did was get rid of exchange and Outlook.
I signed us up for Google Apps Premium Edition. We get to use our own domain, get state of the art web mail with POP and IMAP access, bullet proof and super slick calendaring, support for blackberries and iPhones, a home portal page, document sharing, and much more for $50 per user per year. We can manage it all with a web based interface. We get Postini archiving and policy management included for free. It's really a great deal.
And the nicest thing about it is that end user support is almost non-existent. Who doesn't know how to use Gmail? Now, people can still use a mail client if they want but that's their business and I don't have to support it. To provision an account I just set them up with one form and send them to start.ourdomain.com and they have all the links to all of our systems in one place. No client config instructions, nothing.
So one of our change-resistant users went back to Outlook via IMAP earlier this week. Today she said she went back to the google mail web interface because Outlook did not route some of her mail out yesterday. There are tons of reasons this can happen and I'm glad I don't need to spend time investigating them or dreading people moving to Outlook 2007 and whatnot.
Free at last! (well, $50/year/user anyway)
1 comment:
that's genius. I think everyone should set Outlook on fire!
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