E-mail: Outsource or keep in house?

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, e-mail was just moving from techno-novelty to normal business tool but now everyone just expects to be able to read their e-mail 24x7, anywhere in the world, accessible from any device. It has become like getting dial tone when you pick up a phone – is just there. Even though social media appears to be displacing e-mail in general communication, all businesses will need to maintain e-mail access for their employees for the foreseeable future.

E-mail systems can be pretty messy to maintain, though. Sure, the big companies can afford to have specialists to setup and maintain e-mail systems but what should a smaller company do? How to pick a system for a company of 30 or 150 employees? Do they go open source? Gmail? In house Exchange? Hosted Exchange? Classic POP or IMAP?

I am a bit biased since my experience is with maintaining Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Outlook’s shared calendar features, invitations, contact management, and all the productivity tricks have just become too standard – almost everyone uses Outlook and you get the best user experience when it is connected to a Microsoft Exchange server. Prior to the recent rise of hosted Exchange providers this was pretty expensive, but things have changed.

In fact, there are so many options that it can get frustrating to find the best option. Here are my guidelines:

Size

• If you have less than 50 people in your company, you should use a hosted service.
• If you have more than 250 people in your company, you should have in-house e-mail systems

If you are between 51 and 249 people then you need to look at these questions:

• If you already have an in-house IT staff, servers at a high-quality data center, and are used to providing 24x7 services, you should probably bring the e-mail system in house
• If you have custom applications on your network that send and receive e-mail, you should probably bring the e-mail system in house
• If all your servers exist in your offices and those offices have only basic batter backup, basic access to the internet, and you do not have IT staff with e-mail experience, you should use a hosted service

Hosted Solutions

For those companies looking at hosted solutions, the character of your employees will likely determine which type of hosted solution you should use.

• If you have employees that are not techies (meaning that they just want Outlook to work and don’t care about anything happening in the back) then you should get a Hosted Exchange service with spam filtering and ActiveSync access for smart phones.
• If you have people who already use Google docs, like experimenting with new things, and are generally self sufficient when they have IT issues, then it generally doesn’t matter what e-mail system you use. However, Gmail seems to offer the best deal for this time of office culture.

Of all the hosting options available, please do everyone a big favor and don’t use POP e-mail. A service with IMAP is acceptable as long as it is the Secure IMAP that uses encryption but please, please, please, stop using POP. IMAP, Gmail, and Exchange all use the idea that there is only one mailbox and that mailbox can be read and copied to multiple locations while still acting as one mailbox. POP is a temporary parking spot for mail and the local software is not really “linked” to the POP server. If you connect to e-mail with multiple devices – which almost everyone does these days – you end up with partial copies of e-mail scattered all over the place. Mail sent from your phone is not visible on your computer, mail deleted on your computer might still exist on your phone, and so on. Better solutions exist, so stop using POP.

In House Solutions

I still strongly recommend Microsoft Exchange – the features are just too comprehensive and too useful.

Due to recent changes in how the software works, Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010 can run on much cheaper hardware than Exchange 2003 could. You still want to make sure you get good quality, redundant hardware with plenty of RAM and disk space but this will no longer break your budget quite as much as it used to. The exact details of what you need is impossible to describe in a single blog post but if you are in Seattle, Portland, or anywhere along the west coast of the US, my old company ISOutsource.com can give you practical advice and help you set it up. They've been working with Exchange since Exchange 5.5 and have consultants that have done more installations than you’ve done oil changes.

You will still want a hosted anti-spam service. By hosting it outside your network, none of that spam will travel down your internet connection and free up bandwidth for real business. Also, you won't have to worry about updating the system or maintaining the anti-spam definitions.