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Some businesses prefer to have their email onsite (maintain an email server), while others opt to have it hosted outside their physical building and maintained by a 3rd party. Which do you prefer and why?
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Andrew,
In today's economy I would look to acquire as many compute and office productivity resources as a service vs. using any capital expenditures, plus administrative, maintenance and operational costs associated with running the service yourself.
I can share with you that some of the largest companies in the world, even high-tech companies, now view email as a "commodity" service and the amount of internal spend for running and maintaining this service is out of control.
The same bleeds over to small to medium size businesses.
The security argument is also moot from my perspective. Most small to medium size businesses already use a remote continuous data protection backup services on their local computers - so they are already using external data solutions. And, unless they encrypt every piece of email that they send out of their firewalls I can't accept the argument around security, since all of their data is clear-text on the internet already.
To setup a SME to run email, it's not just buying a server running Windows and MS Exchange, it's redundancy, it's uninterruptible "clean" power, it's regular backup for data-protection, and restore, it's varying levels of compliance, it's connectivity to other resources such as BlackBerry or other mobile computing devices, its expertise with the hardware storage configurations; the list goes on and on.
Don't be fooled into thinking that a small company orders a box from Dell loads some software and they are up running, that's only the case if "reliability" does not matter.
Now compare that with, an invoice that the small business owner gets each month, and that's it. You see, if I'm in a hotel across the globe, I want to plug-in open a browser and know my email "just works", and that my Blackberry “just works” - and not deal with the cleaning person scenario where they unplugged the server while vacuuming. When you buy a service what you are really purchasing is peace of mind and a decent night’s sleep.
From a shopping perspective, there are lots of communication and collaboration offerings available, it's not just Google.
Many providers offer Hosted Exchange and other platforms, etc. Also, note that calendaring is more and more becoming available ubiquitously vs. the vendor lock-in that has been the norm, especially with Outlook. Solutions like Tungle.com are breaking that barrier so sharing calendars is available across mail systems.
And open-source alternatives to Exchange, such as www.scalix.com are very mature and offered as in-house as well as outsourced through many providers.
Good Luck,
Peter
January 2009
* http://www.tungle.com
* http://www.scalix.com