The Official Brio's Blog

Many small and mid-sized businesses are re-evaluating their email service. In the past, the de-facto email standard was Microsoft Exchange installed on a Windows server that you hosted in house. In the past couple of years, many new options have emerged and are being considered seriously by small business. The two major competitors in the Software as a Service (SaaS) market are Google Apps and Microsoft Hosted Exchange.

Why hosted email?

Before we can get into the pros and cons of Google Apps and Hosted Exchange, we first have to examine why people are moving over to hosted email in the first place. I think it is safe to say that most users expect email to work ALL the time. For small companies with a small or non-existent IT department, providing a service with 99.9% uptime is fairly difficult and expensive. Anytime that there is a disruption in service, such as the server going down or being compromised, the IT admin has to scramble to get everything up. Any downtime whatsoever results in extremely unhappy users and an exhausted and stressed IT admin. Another big issue for expanding companies is scalability and how much it costs to do that scaling.

How does hosted email solve this problem?

A hosted email solution with a reputable company offers extremely reliable email service without all of the headaches and costs. Scalability is a non-issue, as a company like Google or Microsoft is already handling hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of email accounts. Keeping their system up and running is something that both take extremely seriously, and pump millions of dollars and very talented engineering into. Basically, economies of scale allows these large companies to provide a better email service at a cheaper price.

Conclusion

I would go with Google Apps. The main reason for that is cost, Microsoft is simply charging too much. As you can see, Google Apps just beat out Hosted Exchange. The key was all those extras that Google throws in and that Microsoft does not.

I’m confused by the value of the offerings for Google Apps from Google.  Premier and standard edition ??.

I’m thinking of moving my corporate / business e-mail to a hosted solution.So, I am exploring the options that are available for Google’s email solution.

Here is what I am looking for:

• First and foremost  is availability. I want it available always (100% availability) Since nowadays email runs businesses.
• Value! ! I don’t mind paying but I expect to get additional value for the paid service when comparing it to a free service. Support is very important
• IMAP and POP access to e-mail accounts.
• Emails, contacts and Calender should be in Sync. I don’t want to open my outlook to see meetings. Want to access them from my Blackberry directly.
• Clean and usable web interface to e-mail. This is going to be used by non-technical staff  (sales & marketing) , so ease of use is very important.
• Decent amount of storage space. Decent is defined by me to be 10 GB of storage.

Google Apps Standard  edition does not have support.  No SLA (Service Level Agreement)  for availability which mean no uptime Guarantee ….Sorry not for businesses. But on the other hand Google Apps Premier Edition offers powerful messaging and collaboration apps that meet business-critical needs:

• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• 25GB of email storage per employee
• Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability
• Mobile email, calendar and IM access
• Industry-leading security
• Full administrative and data control
• Helpful support choices
• $50 per user per year
• Proven cost savings

These above feature make it enterprise and business ready hosted email solution.

Compare Google Apps Standard v/s Google Apps Premier