Email today is the lifeline to communication. Some companies and non-profit organizations would rather lose electrical power than lose their ability to deal with e-mail.
When you start a business or organization, you will need to determine what kind of e-mail system best suits your needs. How many users will you have? Can more than one person view the emails at the same time? Can contacts be shared easily? Will e-mail be answered from Outlook, online or both?
Creating a free G-mail account is an option. The challenge is that only one mailbox can be answered at one time. Document sharing is more challenging and if there is more than one person at the company, how will the other staffers access the email from the first account?
There are some work-arounds but nothing is perfect. A free G-mail account is a one-person situation; other clients prefer integrating an e-mail system into their websites.
The high-end choice is to purchase an e-mail system from a web-hosting carrier such as 1&1 or GoDaddy. For about $10 a month the company can get up to 500 email addresses. The webhost offers the ability to answer e-mail from their web portal via the Internet. Outlook can download these e-mails with the proper macros.
Document sharing is critical to day-to-day business operations. Where will these documents be stored? Most web-hosting carriers give space for e-mail but it might fill quickly. The two popular are to create a Microsoft Exchange Server or using Google Apps.
Microsoft Exchange is the most popular server solution. This will require a purchasing a server and a qualified IT person to manage it. Outlook answers e-mail with Microsoft Exchange, and the files are stored on the server. If the user’s PC is corrupt or taken offline. The IT person will reconfigure Outlook and the emails will repopulate, and Exchange offers other benefits, too.
Today Google’s success and growth of the web-based Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education offer another popular and more affordable choice. Note this is a paid Google service for business but it is free to schools and non-profits—including support. Most local schools run Google Apps for their staff and students, and large fortune 500 companies use GAFB today.
Users access an account, for example, mail.garbcg.com. The username is the e-mail address and password. The look and feel of GAFB looks and is essentially G-mail, though Outlook can be configured to use GAFB. The mailboxes are larger and offer all of the features of G-mail. Sharing Documents is much simpler. Groups of e-mail users can be created within the company. Typing in another user’s e-mail address will search all of the staff for the correct e-mail address spelling. The full Google Apps suite is available to all of the users. The calendar can be shared with all or remain private for one user.
The administration is all done via the web. Users can be promoted to Super-user to help administer GAFB. The speed of the e-mails is Google speed. Since GAFB is native to G-mail, setting up a Smartphone is really simple.
The cost is $5 per month per user. With all GAFB, incredible support is available to help with setup and migrating over from another web host, e-mail carrier or G-mail. There are some growing pains when migrating over from one carrier to Google Apps. If a user uses Gmail already the learning curve is much shorter.
There are a slew of paid third-party apps that can be added to GAFB that will meet the company’s needs, and Chromebooks can be managed and implemented with Google Apps.
Chaim Silberstein Teaneck’s resident e-mail expert told JLBC. “A business owner will know they have outgrown their current solution when they are getting complaints about slow e-mails or need to purchase more space. Google Apps is a simple and easy approach from a company of 5 or 500.”
Before you do anything, do your research, choose a migration date, and above all communicate with your staff. That’s critical.
By Shneur Garb
