“Exchange” your POP mail solution

When I first started in the IT services business back in the late 90’s, e-mail was starting to become pretty important to most business. Still the prevailing opinion back then was that when comparing importance of availability, e-mail was a distant second to the company phone system. In fact, people would continual say authoritatively “The phone systems CAN NOT go down!”

Today, pretty much every worker has a cellular phone, and while still very inconvenient, if the corporate phone system does go down, business still functions. E-mail on the other hand has become such a mission critical component of the way we do business, the importance of a reliable, available, and secure system is a huge priority of businesses of all size.

As CEO of a company who acts as the outsourced IT department for dozens of small business, you can imagine we are in a position to make recommendations for e-mail solutions frequently. There are basically two options when it comes to managing e-mail. On one hand you have server based e-mail solutions and on the other you have desktop (POP) e-mail. In the case of the desktop solutions, e-mail is routed from a server on the internet, usually owned by your ISP, to the desktops in your environment where your e-mail will ultimately reside on the PC of the user. A server based solution, all the e-mail for the corporation is funneled to a server on the network and the users access the local server to see their mail.

The desktop solutions are very inexpensive (in many cases free), but are very unadvisable for an organization that values security, reliable, ease of access, or availability to e-mail. A much better idea is to spend the money on an e-mail server. By centrally managing all e-mail boxes in your company, you can now back-up email, control access, and offer a wide range of connectivity options such as remote locations, handheld devices, or web-consol access. Furthermore, since all of the e-mail boxes are centrally located a variety of enhanced collaborative features are available to your team such as shared contacts or the ability to view other workers calendars.

Of the server based e-mail options out there, by far the most popular for small businesses is Microsoft Exchange Server. It is extremely feature rich and because it is so popular, it is much easier to find good IT support than other options such as Novell Groupwise, Lotus Notes, or free software built on Linux. If you haven’t yet moved your business to a server based e-mail platform….there is no time like the present. You won’t regret your decision.