Email hosting for SMME

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Tweeds

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Hi there, I am looking for some advice as I have been tasked with upgrading our current email service at work. We are using Webafrica and apparently have a limit of 25 mailboxes. I would like to add maybe another 15 email addresses. So far it seems like either Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps is the solution. Some of the mailboxes have years of mail and therefore I need probably between 10 and 20gb for some of the mailboxes whereas others will be very small. We do use Excel quite extensively which keeps me going back to Microsoft. I suppose I could use Google for email through Outlook and Microsoft for productivity. At $5 per person per month it can get expensive when adding lots of email accounts. Is there anything in between R200 for loads of email accounts with low storage and $5 per account with large storage? Another necessary feature is calendaring.

Thank you!
 
How about using a different South African host (less expensive than Google/MS) and then use email clients/IMAP to keep mail synced? Are there any issues with your current setup at WA? If not, then just migrate to a host that offers more mailboxes.
 
Idiosyncratic said:
How about using a different South African host (less expensive than Google/MS) and then use email clients/IMAP to keep mail synced? Are there any issues with your current setup at WA? If not, then just migrate to a host that offers more mailboxes.
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Thanks for the response. As far as I know our email is currently not encrypted which is a concern for my manager. Also, he would like shared calendaring (i'm not sure if this is a function of the email hosting or the email client). Most employees have either Office 365, or Office 2010 or 2013.
 
Tweeds said:
Hi there, I am looking for some advice as I have been tasked with upgrading our current email service at work. We are using Webafrica and apparently have a limit of 25 mailboxes. I would like to add maybe another 15 email addresses. So far it seems like either Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps is the solution. Some of the mailboxes have years of mail and therefore I need probably between 10 and 20gb for some of the mailboxes whereas others will be very small. We do use Excel quite extensively which keeps me going back to Microsoft. I suppose I could use Google for email through Outlook and Microsoft for productivity. At $5 per person per month it can get expensive when adding lots of email accounts. Is there anything in between R200 for loads of email accounts with low storage and $5 per account with large storage? Another necessary feature is calendaring.

Thank you!
Click to expand...

Office365 is the defacto business standard. It just works with all devices ans syncs, shares. Google Mail, doesnt work with Outlook for Calendar shares etc. 50Gb mailbox that is backed up and compliant. All encrypted.
 
qwertydudeza said:
Office365 is the defacto business standard. It just works with all devices ans syncs, shares. Google Mail, doesnt work with Outlook for Calendar shares etc. 50Gb mailbox that is backed up and compliant. All encrypted.
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Thanks, at R215.00/month for email and Office, it's going to cost an arm and a leg for 30 odd users. Are these generally accepted IT costs for small businesses?
 
Tweeds said:
Thanks, at R215.00/month for email and Office, it's going to cost an arm and a leg for 30 odd users. Are these generally accepted IT costs for small businesses?
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Yip, then Office software is update and licenced. There is no server costs, backups etc.
The package includes One Drive for Business and SharePoint. So you have a full enterprise solution at a fraction of the cost.
With each user having 1Tb of storage. You can also have retension rules so if someone decides to leave and delete everything you can recover. Also it allows full collaboration where multiple people can work on the same document or spreadsheet at the same time. You can control sharing and permissions.
 
Arthur said:
It's cheap at the price, in my view. O365 is hassle-free. We use it for all staff.
Click to expand...

qwertydudeza said:
Yip, then Office software is update and licenced. There is no server costs, backups etc.
The package includes One Drive for Business and SharePoint. So you have a full enterprise solution at a fraction of the cost.
With each user having 1Tb of storage. You can also have retension rules so if someone decides to leave and delete everything you can recover. Also it allows full collaboration where multiple people can work on the same document or spreadsheet at the same time. You can control sharing and permissions.
Click to expand...

Ok thank you
 
Tweeds said:
Thanks for the response. As far as I know our email is currently not encrypted which is a concern for my manager. Also, he would like shared calendaring (i'm not sure if this is a function of the email hosting or the email client). Most employees have either Office 365, or Office 2010 or 2013.
Click to expand...

Most hosts offer mail encryption - this shouldn't be a problem. Why not just have shared calendaring separate from the mail - there are SO many free/cheap solutions out that for that. Why would you spend thousands of $$$s every year if you can do exactly the same at a fraction of the cost? This is without sacrificing on quality.
 
I see that Webafrica has a 20gb mailbox with unlimited email addresses (although the small print says up to 30 users)? Is it feasible to have everyone using IMAP? There idea is that users would have access on their mobile devices and computers. The only challenge then is the mailbox limit - is it possible to set how long to store the mail before deleting using IMAP? Backups would have to be done weekly I imagine to our local server.

Thanks
 
Tweeds said:
I see that Webafrica has a 20gb mailbox with unlimited email addresses (although the small print says up to 30 users)? Is it feasible to have everyone using IMAP? There idea is that users would have access on their mobile devices and computers. The only challenge then is the mailbox limit - is it possible to set how long to store the mail before deleting using IMAP? Backups would have to be done weekly I imagine to our local server.

Thanks
Click to expand...

You are only looking at their email hosting.. They have a normal hosting package for the same price as the email hosting you are looking at, but with unlimited disk space and unlimited email accounts.. you dont have to use the website hosting portion of it at all.. yes, it is feasible to have everyone using IMAP.. You no longer have the mailbox limit challenge.. you can use Outlooks auto cleanup function to remove mail after a set period, but it may be more preferable to have the users archive their mail instead.. this leaves their mailboxes small and provides a backup as well.. the easiest is to create a gmail account for each user, [email protected] for example, set this up in their Outlook and have them drag old email over to the gmail account..
 
I dont know, looking at the market, O365 is not always the best option, there are a lot of companies doing hosted Exchange hosted locally in SA which wont cost you an arm and a leg, and the nice thing is, is that you wont be that reliant on international internet breakout
 
Office 365 just for the mailboxes is around R86 per month per user. 50GB mailbox.

If you need calendar sharing and or other collaboration office 365 is the way to go.

Just alone the seamless integration with mobile devices and desktop email clients is worth the R86 per user.

No backups needed on your side, pretty much 100% uptime etc..

Edit. Just see their pricing went up. We are paying R65,90 per user per box. Hmm
 
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