I work in a small business firm with less than 100 employees. The firm is growing with new employees. Last year we had about 40 employees, and currently we have about 65 employees. I am guessing over the next year or so, we will have about 100 employees or so.
For our email services, we rely on a third party local firm which provides IMAIL service for our email accounts. We use pop and smtp to get the emails from the external mail server to sync them with our Outlook, Blackberries, Palms and other PDAs. We also depend on Outlook for calendars, to-do lists and contacts. We pay around $100/month for 65 email addresses to the third party email service provider.
Recently, I have been thinking of an alternative email service options. The two main options that we have right now are a) Exchange Server 2007 OR b) Google’s Gmail Business service.
Google’s Business Gmail service would cost $50/user/year, where as Microsoft Exchange License would cost us around $65-70/user. I understand that the Exchange will be less expensive on a long run, however, the initial cost will involve new hardware, new licenses, possibly new anti-spam filters, new routers, new backup software, etc. Exchange will also require a lot of maintenance, however the firm’s IT department has only ONE IT person.
So I am just trying to find out what could few other pros and cons of moving to Exchange or GMail. Please share any experiences you have had so far with Exchange migration or while using Gmail in corporate environment.