Debating a move to Google Apps Premier
I currently have my main email address on a hosted Microsoft Exchange server. I pay over £70 a year for the privilege. I’m being driven by my “bottom” line and so have started looking at ways to cut this cost. I need the functionality of being able to sync my emails, contacts, calendar and tasks (not as important), OTA (over the air). I have several other emailaddresses i.e info@, accounts@, enquiries@ which are IMAP enabled accounts on my domain.
I have been considering moving over to Google Apps Premier (GAPE) as it will give me the functionality I need. However, it would appear that each mailbox on your domain is required to have a GAPE licence, which is around £33 per year, per user. This would cost me far more than my current service. I’ve been doing some research and it appears that it is possible to have Google Apps Premier AND Google Apps Standard on the SAME domain.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has successfully implemented the above or can tell me some other way of configuring my domain, so that I only pay for one licence for my main email address.
Please leave your comments and experiences below.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Hi Dee,
I’d be interested in the outcome of this issue. Did you opt for Google in the end or another solution?
Wesley
Hi Dee
Hosting your email via Google apps is very cost efficient way to keep hold of all your email addresses, I have found having role out Google Apps to SME that it really does depend on the size and needs of your business.
In a large a environment Exchange and all it’s features can’t be beaten to be honest . But considering that most SME have under 20 employees and unless you start hiring like crazy, then I would stick with Google….Hope that helps
We have been successful using google apps for 6/7 years now, it works smoothly throughout the company. We use the free version and have always used it.
Every ‘brand’ that our company has is operated through the same domain (conceptideas.co.uk) and we then disguise the outgoing mail to whatever the brand like (rochestercoffee.co.uk)
This has connected every aspect of our business and although we don’t have the push functionality to blackberries, iphones & palms it works fine and save us £000′s a year.
What kind of smart phone are you using? As many of them already sync your inbox contacts with your phone. I also use outlook with push for my personal email account however I have noticed on my palm, all 800+ of my work contacts are also synced to my smart phone, including all there emails.
Google is a very good solution and hence we have been using it for a long time, it’s cost effective and works. Inside google apps you can set up ‘domain references’ and you will then have to change the MX records with your registrar to point to google’s mail servers, this is only relevant if you have more than one domain.
For the @info @accounts etc. Google apps allows you to set up ‘Nick names’ which allows you to create external addresses that direct to your inbox. This is quite simple in the control panel section and much better than having lots of inboxes.
Google doesn’t allow you to have folders currently but it enables you to label the income mail based on subject, income email address, marked text etc.