Today, I wish to discuss email. Not such a fashionable topic these days with
all the hype around social networking, blogging and Google ads. It has been my experience though, that email
has become one of the most important business tools for small and medium
businesses. Since its emergence in the
mid 90’s, when gateway protocols allowed private corporate email systems to
connect to each other, email has become integrated into our daily business
processes.
Despite its importance, email is often an afterthought to
small businesses.
Here are my guidelines for business email
- Have and use your own domain for your email address. Ten years ago, it would have been acceptable to use an email address with your isp or one of the free email services like Hotmail or Gmail. Today when I see a business that does not have their own domain for emails, it raises a red flag.
- Make sure that you archive and control your business emails. So often, small businesses use an email client on an employee’s laptop. What happens if that laptop is lost, stolen or the employee just decided to keep or delete your businesses emails? Email us a critical part of your business correspondence, have a policy and know where your email is.
- Do not use a free email service. Your email is critical to your business, free email services come with lots of strings attached. You give up a lot of privacy and the email provider really has no responsibility to you. Make sure that your email provider is responsible and works for you.
Up until a few years ago, for small businesses who wanted to
have a secure, reliable email solution I would’ve recommended an MS Small
Business Server which includes Exchange server.
This was a moderately expensive proposition that required regular
maintenance. This solution only made sense in businesses that had 10 or more
employees. There really was no good
solution for small offices of 1 to 9 employees.
In the last few years cloud services have exploded and
currently there are cloud based exchange services that are inexpensive and can
be deployed to an individual, a small office or even up to organizations of
1000’s of employees.
I recommend Microsoft Office 365 hosted exchange
services. The hosted exchange service
is currently $4.10 a month per mailbox. This service provides a number of
benefits:
1) 25gig per mailbox, it can be allocated as you
like
2)
Exchange access with outlook 2007 and above
3)
Activesync for Android, IOS and Blackberry 10
devices
4)
Blackberry cloud services for legacy
Blackberries.
5)
Wireless calendar and contact sync for smart
phones and tablets
6)
Shared calendar and mailboxes
7)
Email is secure and backed up.
8)
Available archiving services
9)
Control of your companies email.
10)
Spam and antivirus protected
11)
A service level agreement with guaranties
For smaller offices 1 to 10 people, Office 365 Hosted
exchange service now provides an economical way to get the same advanced email
capabilities that most large corporations have been using for years. An assistant can have delegation rights and
make changes to your calendar, these changes will almost immediately appear on
your smart phone.
For business that already have a Small Business server and
are looking at upgrading the server due to capacity, can often avoid the
hardware upgrade by moving to Office 365 for hosted exchange, disabling the
exchange server function, which in most SBS servers is the biggest drain on
resources. The transition to Office 365
will be much less expensive than a new server for Exchange and your service
will be improved, your emails will be protected and your ongoing costs will
likely be lower.
Hosted exchange, is one cloud service, that is a real winner
in my opinion
