Has email become a commodity? It depends who you ask. For years Microsoft has had the market (62% of commercial email according to a recent Radicati Group analysis) believing that premise-based collaboration with all the bells and whistles was a requirement of a savvy business. In fact, Microsoft would lead you to believe that email and collaboration is unique to each commercial entity when in fact almost every Exchange Server I’ve deployed has been homogeneous.
We all have the same basic email and collaboration needs. We need it to be available anywhere, it has to have ample storage, and we need to easily create and share content (docs, spreadsheets, etc.). Google Apps provides these core features without all the fuss of more servers, software and licensing, and ongoing IT support. Google Apps Premier includes Google Sites, Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentation, Postini SPAM filtering and security policies, GMail and Google Talk with 25Gb per user for $50 / user / year. This approach to email and collaboration is gaining significant market share, even Microsoft has retooled their approach by launching Microsoft Live, a Google Apps approach to email and collaboration. In the end, the commoditization of email helps us all – we get more features, better access and scalability and all for less money! To find out more on SaaS email platforms please contact Agosto today.
Aric Bandy
Aric, can you please explain how the user experience–let’s say of an account manager–is or isn’t different when using Google Apps instead of a site-specific Exchange Server?
One common misunderstanding is Google Apps is web-based only however you can use Outlook via IMAP. In this setup, Outlook functions exactly to an Exchange environment.
In addition to using Outlook, you can use the Google Apps web interface. This is a feature-rich web interface that parallels gmail (which many of us use for personal email). The interface has almost all of the same functionality but it’s laid out a bit differently that Outlook. Here’s a great video that walks through the basics of Google Apps Standard. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJT3pagjd8s. For hard-core Outlook users it takes a little getting use to however most agree that it’s a much better way to manage information.