Email in the “Cloud”

/ Technology / 2 minutes of reading

In January this year we migrated our almostanything.com.au email into the “cloud” using Google Apps. It’s worked really well for us – here are some of the advantages:

  1. Google has quite effective spam filtering in place and it’s really cut down on the junk mail we receive each day.
  2. The free version of Google Apps allows about 7 gigabytes of online storage per mailbox. That means you can leave a copy of all your email on Google’s servers. In the event of your computer crashing or getting stolen, you can then re-download your Outlook inbox.
  3. Rather than relying on a single server to be online (as is probably the case for you now) your email is stored in server farms. One single machine can crash but others take up the slack, reducing the likelihood of email downtime.

However – if you choose to upgrade to the Business Edition, you also get:

  1. The ability to synchronise all your email, contacts and calendar between Outlook and your smartphone, instantly in the background over the internet. Very handy if you own an iPhone or similar.
  2. Ugraded mailbox sizes (25 gigabytes per mailbox)
  3. 99.9% uptime guarantee

Read more about the differences here: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

What are the disadvantages?

Your email is being pushed through Google’s mail servers. If you have the free version then there’s nobody you can call if you can’t access your email – although Google tend to know when their servers go down. It doesn’t happen often, but no system is perfect. (If you choose the pay for the business edition you are provided with a Google phone number for emegency support.)

We believe the 3 advantages listed above that come with the free version alone make the transition worthwhile.

If you use a smartphone, or use webmail often, then the syncronisation tool makes the Business Edition a very valuable upgrade.

We can set this up today and tomorrow you’ll be receiving your email via Google Apps – but from your perspective you can still use Outlook as you always have. Contact us if you’d like to know more!

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