Everybody loves “Cloud Computing”, and your E-Mail is perhaps the application that’s most suited to running in the Cloud, as E-Mail already comes from and goes to places outside your organisation. Two of the biggest platforms for Cloud-based E-Mail are:
- Office365 – Microsoft Exchange, hosted at Microsoft.
- GoogleApps – Enterprise version of Google’s E-Mail system.
Both have their good points and their bad points, and PC Correct can implement both. If you want to move your E-Mail to the cloud, speak to us and we’ll work through your requirements and make a recommendation as to which one to use. But here are some pros and cons of each system to give you an idea of what they’re like.
E-Mail interface
Most businesses already use Microsoft Outlook and this is the “native” client that’s used with Office365. You can also use “Outlook Web Access”, something that many people are already familiar with, to access it via a web browser. And of course as well as E-Mail, both of these programs give you access to your calendar, contacts etc which are all stored on the Office365 server.
GoogleApps is best used via the GMail web interface, something which many people are familiar with. There is also a GoogleApps synchronisation tool for Microsoft Outlook to allow you to stick with this if you’re already familiar with it, although this is less polished than using Microsoft Outlook talking directly to a Microsoft Exchange server. GoogleApps also provides calendars, contacts etc again both via the web interface and the Outlook synchronisation.
E-Mail – the technical side
Both systems offer you 25 GB of storage space. This should be more than you’re likely to need! Microsoft Outlook has a long standing archiving system which can be set to automatically archive E-Mails into local folders on your machine periodically (eg “Every month, archive everything older than 1 year”). GoogleApps at the moment doesn’t have this facility.
Office365 incorporates Microsoft Forefront anti-virus / anti-spam on all packages, to ensure that nothing dangerous or annoying gets to your Inbox. GoogleApps incorporates the Postini system which while less powerful is also effective.
Chatting and Colaboration
GoogleApps has the GoogleChat system, which is integrated with your contacts and can be used either through the web interface, or by installing the GoogleTalk application on your computer.
With Office365, Microsoft have introduced their new Lync service, an advanced system which as well as chat supports file transfer, audio and video chat, and integrates with Microsoft Outlook. It can also link to users who run Windows Messenger and AOL chat, and supports meetings with up to 250 participants.
Office365 also includes Sharepoint, a platform for hosting web sites (public facing Internet or internally facing Intranet), and for file sharing and collaboration.
Other Applications
GoogleApps gives you access to Google’s impressive online office application system – GoogleDocs. This includes a web based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation application, all designed to work from the bottom-up “online”. And because of this, they allow online document sharing and collaboration to work really well.
Office365 also provides online office applications, again including Word, Excel and Powerpoint. However while they may in some ways be more familiar to existing users of Microsoft Office than GoogleDocs is, they are perhaps less well designed to work online.
However, some configurations of Office365 also a license for the full Office 2010 Professional Plus, which you can download and install on your computer and use this to access all your Office365 resources using the latest versions of the Microsoft Office applications.
Offline working
What if you’re not connected to the Internet for a while? Can you still work? Of course, the web-based Outlook Web Access and GMail interfaces can’t be used, but what other options are there?
If you’ve configured Microsoft Outlook on your computer, then you can continue to work with both your Office365 and GoogleApps E-Mail offline, although of course E-Mails won’t be sent and new E-Mails won’t be received until you’re back online.
Cost
Last, but by no means least, is of course the cost of the two systems.
GoogleApps is simple – £33 per user per year.
Office365 varies depending on what options you want. It’s priced on a “per user, per month” basis and varies from about £4 to £18. More expensive packages include more of the options listed above, and better support services. There are also bulk discounts available.
So what next?
Give us a call or drop us an E-Mail. We at PC Correct are resellers for both Office365 and GoogleApps and can set up either service for you. We’ll listen to your requirements make a recommendation as to which one we think suits you best.
Whether you decide to go with our recommendation, or to go with the other package, we can configure it and migrate over your existing E-Mail and documents, to enable you to work in the best way possible.
