Corporate Email Solutions

Every­one seems to have their pre­ferred sys­tem of deal­ing with email. For per­sonal email most peo­ple use Yahoo, Hot­mail or Google mail. The prob­lem that busi­nesses face is that these ser­vices are inad­e­quate.

What are the options?

If you are in a large organ­i­sa­tion it is most likely that you already using Microsoft Exchange for your server and Out­look for your email client.  At Hyper­Stream we use Google Apps and Google Mail. It does every­thing we need for email and con­tact man­age­ment and inte­grates nicely with our Mobile Phones. Another solu­tion called Zim­bra is also very good and quite pop­u­lar in edu­ca­tional estab­lish­ments as it is Open Source.

Google Apps

Ben­e­fits of using Google Apps

• Best spam fil­ter­ing that we have seen
• Smooth inte­gra­tion with Mobiles
• Share your cal­en­der with peo­ple out­side of your domain
• List email in threaded con­ver­sa­tional view
• Super fast email searching
• Loads of  cus­tomiza­tion options
• Access email from any­where, and any device

Although Google Apps is excel­lent for most busi­nesses, it may not always be  suit­able for every sit­u­a­tion. For very large orga­ni­za­tions with com­plex infra­struc­tures Google Apps may seem very expen­sive, before such a deci­sion is made we rec­om­mend doing a review of your cur­rent costs includ­ing IT Staff cost, server main­te­nance, etc. You can use The Google sav­ing cal­cu­la­tor.

Zim­bra

Zim­bra is unique as it is the only Open Source solu­tion solu­tion here. It’s a very cus­tomis­able solu­tion with lots of great fea­tures, you can check out a demo here.

Would we rec­om­mend it? If you have a large organ­i­sa­tion and the hard­ware to sup­port it then it could be a great solu­tion com­pared to Exchange,  Zim­bra is def­i­nitely worth inves­ti­ga­tion and could save you money.

Microsoft Exchange

Exchange has been around for ages and is not going any­where. It can be a very pow­er­ful Mail Server if main­tained well, it can cause lots of prob­lems, like bloated in-boxes, and his­tor­i­cally back­ing up all that data has been painful.  Still that said if your organ­i­sa­tion is purely run­ning Microsoft prod­ucts and never intend to change to a mixed envi­ron­ment then maybe you would be bet­ter off stick­ing with it.

Essen­tially any of these sys­tem can work well if setup the right way. If you have over 10 users we rec­om­mended that you con­sult a pro­fes­sional who can rec­om­mend the right solu­tion for your business.