Why be tied down with POP3 Email?

If you are a small busi­ness that finds its reli­ance upon the use of a single com­puter for the man­age­ment of its POP3 email a bit of a pain then read on for a solution?

Per­haps you use Microsoft’s Out­look™ in the office for your day-to-day email­ing needs but also want to access all your email fea­tures from home or from another com­puter whilst on the move, but can’t? Simple you may think, simply log into your account’s web­mail facil­ity when you’re not in the office.

Hang on though! This works in prin­cipal, but are you find­ing a few lim­it­a­tions to this method?

Some of the issues you may exper­i­en­cing might include;

• Mails that are sent from your web­mail account do not appear in your “Sent” folder in your office computer’s Outlook.
• Sim­il­arly, mails sent from your office computer’s Out­look can’t be accessed from your webmail.
• The mail folders you care­fully cre­ated in Out­look to file your emails away are not rep­lic­ated in your webmail.
• Email drafts saved in your Out­look can’t be accessed via web­mail and vice versa.

Sound a famil­iar prob­lem? If so then you’ve hit some of the lim­it­a­tions of POP3 email!

Get Your Head in the Clouds

Get Your Head in the Clouds with Cloud Computing

For the lar­ger busi­ness with per­haps 5 or more Users on their net­work, there’s the Microsoft Exchange Server option which offers some great col­lab­or­a­tion and email fea­tures which will over­come the above obstacles. But what about those busi­nesses that don’t have the budget for such a solu­tion? How can single Users and small company’s, bene­fit from bet­ter email man­age­ment and some great doc­u­ment shar­ing tools?

Get into Google Apps™

The answer is Google Apps. Google Apps is a suite of products that are based in the “cloud” I.e. are an example of Cloud Com­put­ing. If you’re famil­iar with Google’s GMail then you’ll start to under­stand how Google Apps works as GMail, is one of the products that forms part of the suite. Over the last few weeks we’ve moved a num­ber of our client’s over to the bene­fits of using Google Apps for their com­pany email.

Here’s Why…

In my busi­ness my col­leagues and I have suc­cess­fully used Google Apps for the man­age­ment of our email for the last 18 months. Here’s how we and those cli­ents’ whom we’ve recently con­ver­ted, are find­ing the ser­vice beneficial;

• We can access all our emails and email folders from any web con­nec­ted computer.
• The ser­vice seam­lessly and simply integ­rates with our Black­berry phones
• We can still use Out­look as our primary email cli­ent in the office or at home or on another com­puter, whilst still gain­ing access to all our mails and folders etc. (This is done using the IMAP mail pro­tocol as opposed to POP3 which is built into Google Apps Mail and is sup­por­ted by Outlook).
• In addi­tion there’s some great doc­u­ment and cal­en­dar and col­lab­or­a­tion tools that mean we can share word pro­cessing doc­u­ments, spread­sheets and present­a­tions with each other and between com­puters without the need for a com­plex VPN or sep­ar­ate online doc­u­ment stor­age service.
• The in built SPAM fil­ter­ing ser­vice is highly effi­cient which helps keep the rub­bish out.

Stand­ard or Premier Edition?

Google Apps offers two ver­sions for the busi­ness user, namely;

1. The Stand­ard Edi­tion is free but does have a few fea­ture restric­tions and shows adverts on its pages in the same man­ner as the free GMail service.
2. The Premier Edi­tion which costs $50 (around £32) per User per year offers addi­tional fea­tures includ­ing more space, advanced Out­look and Black­berry syn­chron­iz­a­tion and is advert free.

Keep Your Domain

Both ver­sions may be used with your exist­ing email domain name (i.e. yourname@yourdomain.co.uk) which means you don’t have to change any of your cur­rent email addresses. The mail login and sub­sequent pages may be cus­tom­ised with your cor­por­ate logo and brand col­ours as can be seen with this example and this one.

An Over­view of Gmail in Google Apps

I’m Con­vinced, Con­vert Our Mail

If you feel your organ­isa­tion would bene­fit from Google Apps email over its cur­rent email arrange­ment, then get in touch.

Either ver­sion of Google Apps can be set-up for your organ­isa­tion* for a one off fee of £50 + vat. We can also offer Google Apps coach­ing ses­sions on a one-to-one or group basis for your company.

Click Here to Request a Call Back About Google Apps

* Note: We will need admin­is­trat­ive access to your domain name so that some aspects of its DNS can be changed. Your domain admin­is­trator will be able to help with this.

Other Posts Sim­ilar To This One

• Cre­at­ing Easy Web Forms in Google Docs
• Offi­cial Google Blog: Cur­rent Gmail Outage
• Review: Why a GBBO Web­site is Pants for Your Business