Business Email and Collaboration
By Mark Stair

Exchange is a pain to manage and administer. Does it really have to be so hard to manage email for an organization?

We have gone through a number of systems, and now have a complete answer for small and medium sized businesses or even possibly large businesses looking to change their company collaboration and communication. So you probably think that it’s costly to TOTALLY eliminate spam and have a complete business collaboration system. However, what if I told you that you can have all this for FREE! No, this is not advertising, this is our real experience in finding the best email and collaboration system possible, and as an added bonus it is truly free.

The Pain: We implemented Microsoft Exchange Server about a year ago. Being a Gold Partner we get Exchange for “free”, however this has been the most painful, indirectly costly solution. We tried to make it work for a year, but continued to have problems receiving email, keeping out spam, and supporting the users. We purchased and tried many spam blocking programs and continued to spend many hours per week clearing spam. Certain customers were unable to send email to us because other exchange systems will block email if your exchange system is not setup 100% perfectly. This was so painful and we knew there had to be another way.

The Solution: We moved to Google mail and it literally solved all our issues! We now have a completely spam-free email, calendar, and document collaboration, all for free. This is not some @gmail.com, this is email directly to our @h5sw.com and @high5software.com. We highly recommend this solution, but you probably want to get on board fast we are seeing that the free accounts are harder to find and the premium accounts have gone up from $25 to $50 per user per year. You can sign up at http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html which is the free standard account with some advertising. Google uses Postini spam blocking, which works better than anything I have ever used or heard about from anyone. In fact, you can’t get much better since we get literally no more spam. I could go on and on about how happy we are with this solution, but all I can say is it works great, no spam, added collaboration features, syncs with Outlook, and has been a great user experience thus far.

Best of Both Worlds: We kept our exchange along with the Google mail solution, so we possibly have the best of worlds. I don’t necessary recommend this approach if you don’t already have exchange, however if you do have exchange, this is a good low-disruption system. We put Google mail as the front-end for all email. Google takes care of blocking out all spam and gives an internet-based email and collaboration system. Then, have your exchange take care of all internal company mail and a central location for your Outlook folders and backups. We started with moving a new domain address @h5sw.com to the Google mail while all @high5software.com mail continued to go to Exchange. Once we got everything working we moved @high5software.com to be an alias to also go through the @h5sw.com Google mail. I now enjoy an extra 3 hours at least per week because I no longer am forced to deal with spam and the same goes for the rest of the High 5 team. Think about how much additional time you might have for business or family if you eliminated spam for your entire company!

At High 5 Software we believe in helping companies improve operations through business solutions. If we find solutions that will help your business, we will share it in this blog. Obviously, we believe highly in our SME, service management enterprise software solution however we also like to give other tips and tricks for your business such as this Google mail solution. Please feel free to share your business successes here or on our forum at www.high5software.com/forum