This might come as a surprise, but only a handful of years ago, we didn't do much with email except forward silly messages to friends and family, and get a joke of the day update. Some still use email this way, but most of us have realized that email is a very serious thing. Unlike a phone call, it allows us some real formality, while allowing us the time to compose our thoughts and write them out. We use it to communicate those things that we want to have recorded and saved for the future. We use it to transfer files, and conduct business. In many sectors, email accounts for more business than telephone sales.

Wrong. Email has changed a lot over the last few years, and those companies heavily invested in Exchange servers and other corporate email solutions are heading for a bit of a wake-up call. Web based email, once kind of an informal place to have an anonymous account, is now quickly becoming the wave of the future. Where once we had struggles if we had over 1000 messages in our Inbox, or got warnings from the IT department if our account was getting too large, we now have the ability to have huge email accounts for free. Yes, FREE!

We're not sure, especially if they're huddled around an Exchange server, and you can't seem to get an email received from an important contact within a timely fashion. We have made the jump to using Google Apps for most of our clients. Whether your business has 5 employees or 50, Google Apps has a solution. Even larger clients with 200+ email users can benefit from using Google Apps. And, for most of our small business clients, Google Apps is FREE! Even adding new accounts and managing turnover is easy to do, and we will happily train you to manage your own email system. While Google Apps accounts are based in Gmail, you can still go on using Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail.app, or the mail reader of your choice to view and organize your messages.

Absolutely. We are not a reseller, and we don't make any money from recommending them. However, we all save money when you switch. The maintenance costs go way down, as do email storage costs and email server software licensing. It's a simple system, we don't have to maintain the backup, and it's very flexible to meet your business needs.

Well, be prepared to pay more - but we will still support Exchange servers, different web hosting solutions, and just about any email configuration you can pitch at us - even the sometimes cranky UNIX ones. We can discuss options for email backups, and analyze the way your employees use email and work with them to either change bad habits, or maintain a comfortable way of working. It doesn't help to come in and change everything all at once.

Another nice point to the Google platform is that their spam control is almost legendary. We have no complaints from any of the clients we have migrated to Google Apps with regards to spam. For those that choose to stick with what they have, we will work with the tools available to monitor and remove spam and viruses.

Hopefully we can make email concerns go away. We can greatly reduce the cost of email. What we cannot do is stop your sales guy from hitting "Reply All" on company wide memos, or stop your aunt from sending you funny emails with dancing animals. (Well, we could - but what fun would that be!)