How SMBs and SOHOs can cut costs on in-house E-Mail Servers
A friend of my recommended to blog about technology, open source and all that kind of things in the SMB(Small & Medium Businesses) and SOHO(Small Office/Home Office) perspectives. How these people can benefit from open source and from technology in general.
So starting from this post, I will be also blogging more on this topic.
My sister happened to work for a tourism company in KL, the staff number is around 20-25. They have internal E-Mail Server. Somebody (nobody is sure who now) setup their server using Windows 2000 Server as OS, and some 3rd party SMTP and POP3 fetch software.
They always have their downtime, not sure if the E-Mails sent went through, a lot of incoming spam(probably they are also have bots to send out spam) and most annoying part is that they can only use their E-Mails while they are in the office. Which limits their working hours and while their abroad leaves them to use either their Yahoo! or Gmail accounts to communicate. Sometimes they need to refer to their old correspondence and that is quite impossible.
Being an Open Source enthusiast, I offered them to migrate their services to a Linux/BSD platform. Which would have solved half of their problems but not all.
But now I think the perfect solution for them would be to set up Google Apps on their domain. They would get:
- Email with up to 10 GB of storage per custom email account, mail search tools and integrated chat.
- Control Panel
Manage your domain and user accounts online. - Google Talk
Free text and voice calling around the world. - Google Calendar
Coordinate meetings and company events with sharable calendars. - Docs & Spreadsheets
Create, share and collaborate on documents in real-time. - Page Creator
Easily create and publish web pages.
Probabilities are high you have a Gmail account, and quite happy with it. Quite happy with spam handling, conversation method, tagging and starring method, awesome POP3 access without loosing your E-Mails in Gmail just like IMAP and of course integrated Gtalk messenger in Gmail webmail. Now imagine, you can have all of that for your business use! How cool is that? You can have youstaff@yourcompany.com account hosted on Gmail!
Basically, it’s a Google apps - Gmail, Gtalk, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets packaged for your business/personal domain.
Ok, let’s not get too excited and let’s see how can Google’s Gmail be better and cost saving then the internal E-Mail Server at my sisters place.
- They can stop using their server, save money on hardware and maintenance
- Easy and fast webmail access wherever you are
- Outlook support, sadly most of them are on Windows
- Collaboration via Google Calendar
- Collaboration via Google Docs & Spreadsheets
- Spam protection
- 100% mail delivery, that means they don’t have to worry if the other party received or not
- Save some bucks on E-Mail hosting!
- and much more I can’t think of right now…
The installation of this may seem a bit advanced but don’t you worry! You will have to update your MX settings of your DNS to point to Google’s, read Google Apps FAQ. Nowadays almost any registrar would know what Google Apps for your domain means and I’m pretty sure they have done some documentation on that. I’m sure at least GoDaddy has done it. Google have partnered with GoDaddy & eNom to provide this facility.
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Welcome to Arstan's personal blog. This blog includes tips on Linux, Apache, MySQL, Shell Scripts. Hardware/software and internet technologies reviews and updates.
What about P&C stuff? Will you trust google your corporate secrets? Why not just introduce a web-mail feature of the existing MS Exchange? Or why introduction of Linux/BSD type of solution would not solve all of their problems?
If they cannot utilize full list of features provided by MS Exchange, I dont think they will realize any feature that they might be missing right now…
Yes, Privacy and Confidentiality is very important. But for this size companies/firms that’s the least they are bothered. They don’t develop high-tech-top-secret-machines or their business nature doesn’t require this. You would be right to say this where a lot larger company with a competitive product is involved.
And then, they don’t have MS Exchange, all they have is Windows 2000 Server with some 3rd party E-Mail softwares. They would get a really big headache off them going with Google Apps.
Google Apps has an Enterprise edition as well.
So yep, some companies will go for in-house option, some for free Google Apps, and others for Google Apps Enterprise.
I’m gonna propose it to my company (+/-20 people) to move to Google Apps at some stage. I think good things (calendar, gmail, google talk, etc) will outweigh the bad in our case.