Which Email Service Should You Use?
Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 12:20AM Communication is the backbone of any intelligent and well functioning office. Your ability and flexibility with all methods of communication are essential. Staying in touch with fellow staff, clients and vendors and service providers is also essential. Over the past decade email has become a backbone communication service of virtually every office in Canada and internationally. A firm without an email system in place is crippled in the current market. Having the most appropriate email infrastructure can make a significant difference in efficient and effective communication.
Types of Service
There are several offerings for email service available in the market today. They essentially fall into two levels of sophistication; Standard email and Enterprise email:
Standard
Standard email service is available from your internet services provider or your web site service provider. Standard email consists of a server located somewhere on the internet where email is sent. It is held until you connect your email program– usually Outlook. Outlook will connect and download the email from the server and Outlook will also manage removing the same email from the server either immediately or by an aging schedule. When you send email often it is via the same server. In some cases your Internet Service Provider insist you send email via their mail server service. Outlook uses the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) to obtain email from the server. Outlook then uses the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for sending email. SMTP is the generic email protocol used to send emails on the internet. This has been the standard protocol since the late 1970’s.
POP3 is a very simple protocol. A newer protocol called Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) offers an extended set of services. POP3 connects to only one mailbox or folder and only in one direction to download the email. IMAP allows for bidirectional communication with the server for multiple folders. The advantage of this allows the end user to manage multiple email folders and communicate via the server from multiple computers. While this may seem advantageous – it comes with the price of added management of the service. This is a trade off that needs to be considered In each case with each user.
Webmail is also a common method of accessing email. While it is not precisely a protocol, it does provide the same basic features but in a different delivery method that doesn’t require Outlook.
The cost for standard email is very inexpensive. They are usually bundled with name and web services too. For example www.1and1.com offers name, web, email, webmail, and a few extras for as little as $10/year. This includes all the protocols mentioned above.
Enterprise
Enterprise Email is a generic term. In this document we use the term to describe an email system that supplies much more than the standard email protocols. The majority of this is usually Groupware technologies. Groupware is essentially any technology that is made available via servers or services to a group of people. Specifically groupware as it related to enterprise email includes any services that may work well with email. This includes contacts, calendars, memo, tasks, blogs, wikis, and document management, and even facebook, myspace and twitter services. Groupware and Enterprise Email have both been around for 15 years or more. However the costs of setup have drastically reduced to allow even small firms to adopt Enterprise Email infrastructures.
The two most common and widely used are Microsoft Exchange Server and Google Apps. These services directly compete with each other but the offerings vary greatly in services provided and the cost structures. This makes comparison between the two difficult. A core focus of this document is to illustrate the differences between Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps to help offices make intelligent email service decisions.
Outlook is a key program in most small offices. It is an integral part of Microsoft Office and is offered freely with Microsoft Exchange as part of the user licenses. Outlook is much more than just an email tool. Since 1997 it has included Calendars, Contacts, Tasks and Memos. Management of these services when connected to Exchange Server provides an Enterprise Email infrastructure. The Outlook data is then hosted by the exchange server and is available from multiple computers and may be made available to several other users on the same or connected server.
Where is the Data
The important distinction between the locations of services is a simple division. Either your firm contains the email services server within your office or the service is outsourced to a service provider.
Local
The only player in this market that is of any significance is Microsoft Exchange Server. In the Small Business Market, Microsoft has offered the value packed “Microsoft Windows Small Business Server” software package. This includes licenses for Windows Server, Exchange Server and SQL Server as well as a host of other integrated packages and options. For the small business owner planning to deploy just 1 server or just a few servers this bundle is excellent. It supports up to 75 users – but it’s a best fit solution for up to 25 users. The Exchange Enterprise Email service fits tightly with the network services and operation is seamless.
The Cost of setting up an Exchange Server or a Windows Small Business Server varies entirely by number of users. Hardware and software compose a significant portion of the cost and vary by other contributing factors. The range is generally considered to be $200 - $500 per user per year. But this may be mitigated somewhere where the server equipment may be part of a package allowing for other services to also be installed at the office.
Standard Remote
Several vendors are available for off-site standard email servers. www.1and1.com was mentioned above – but there are several others that compete for attention in this category. These services are quick and easy to setup. Even with a new domain name involved the service can be up and running within an hour. As mentioned before the average cost of email is generally less than $10/year per user
Enterprise Remote
Enterprise off-site email services of significance fall into the same two product categories above.
Hosted Exchange
This service is available from several major vendors (Rogers, Bell, and Canada Web Hosting) and allows Outlook to be connected from any Internet Connected location to a full host of Microsoft Exchange Server services. All email, calendar, contacts and related data services are shared between users and their respective devices. Details are in the product comparison below.
The average cost per user per year for Enterprise Hosted Exchange Services varies from $180 to $420 per year. This includes Blackberry Enterprise Server access as a popular and common feature!
Google Apps Services
Google has launched a direct competitor to the Hosted Exchange Service and also targeted the users of local exchange servers as well. The Google service is the same in that it requires your PC to connect to the internet and Outlook or the Google webmail client can be used to access several services. Again details of the service are visible in the product comparison below. Other than Outlook (Microsoft’s most popular email program) Google has developed all of the communication protocols and synchronization services for communication between Outlook and the server and various mobile and wireless connected devices.
Google’s costs are $50/year per user – this covers services and support. All products are otherwise included for free. Note Google Apps is also available in a free version – but proper businesses are not encouraged to take advantage of the free service. It is intended for education and social services.
Product Comparison
It is unfair to compare Standard Email with Enterprise Email as the offerings are so vastly different. The only significant comparison that can be drawn is based in cost and storage space:
Costs
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
* $10000 has been doubled to $20000 for the initial setup as a more robust server is required for 25 users.
Please note that there are some additional cost considerations that include desktop hardware and network and internet connection concerns – however these are also concerns that depend on other services, programs and office products and hence may not directly be dependant. Assessment of all possible associated costs requires consultation with your office.
Storage
Server storage space is often a major factor as email mailbox sizes have doubled in required capacity each year. IT Managers are sometimes left scrambling to find ways to alleviate the bottleneck of overcrowded email mailboxes. Storage space at the server is only a factor if the mail is actually stored at the server. The following illustrates the various amounts of space allowed:
|
|||||||||||||||
Alleviating email storage problems also may require external third party programs to archive and maintain a history of email. Several vendors offer various solutions such as online web storage systems or local in house solutions directly hooked into Exchange Server. ellwood associates does not yet have a preference and our clients are welcome to discuss potential solutions to email storage woes.
Service
All service providers provide some sort of warranty or guarantee of the level of quality of their service. For the most part email services need only to be online and available when you need them. Downtimes of a few minutes here and there may go entirely unnoticed by the end users. Downtimes of anything over 10 minutes will be noticed and beyond an hour is significant. Having no email service for a day or longer can get become a nightmare! As such, despite any assurances the level of service of the product becomes a very important aspect of that product.
Estimates of real downtime and future downtimes are not predictable. Any of these services could experience difficulty. The very nature of the services may allude to their possible outage problems. Past experience is the best guide for estimating potential loss of service scenarios.
|
Deployment
The time to get a service up and running may also be a factor of your choice. Essentially the Standard email service requires little time at all to setup. Whether via a management interface or performed by a technician at the service provider – it is simply a matter of entering the name and email address for each staff member. Some additional steps are required in addition to this – primarily these are to direct the email to the new service and validate it to reduce the chances of outgoing email being identified as having higher spam potential. From decision to proceed to ready to use can be within 1 day.
Google requires a similar setup strategy via its web management interface. Google needs to be validated and tested and staff names and email address need to be entered. Additional steps are required to prepare the webmail interface and potentially link with Outlook. This is usually limited to a few minutes per user and could be completed by end users with a set of instructions. From decision to proceed to ready to use can be within 2 days.
Hosted Exchange Server is a provided service and usually includes a management interface of some kind. Deployment can be a bit more involved depending on the kind of service required. Most service providers require about 5 days to setup. In an emergency it may be possible to complete within 2 days.
Exchange Server is an entirely different proposal and usually involves a project and several weeks to deploy. The hardware needs to be ordered, prepared, tested and deployed. From the moment of purchase to a fully installed exchange server takes 3-4 weeks – This can sometimes be delivered in a little over 2 weeks. But that removes the possibility for adequate testing.
All services except Standard email may require additional time for users to upload their current email, calendar, contacts, memos and tasks to the new server. This doesn’t require comparison as it is a general task required with each service.
Features
Standard email unto itself is feature poor and at most may have a management interface and little else. Even a fancy webmail interface and use of Outlook as a client cannot compare with the Enterprise Email products. So Standard Email will not be considered in the feature comparison below...
This part will attempt to peel back the complex layers of Google Apps and Exchange Server and expose several details that are the same and different in each product. This comparison may be strained at times as both products currently marry themselves to Microsoft Outlook as the common desktop email application. Google Apps also provides a very powerful web interface and Exchange Server also provides a significant Outlook Web Access interface. Each interface provides rich comparisons from the other. The comparison of each of these interfaces and providing rich information regarding the similarities and differences can balance the potential swap the evaluation of these products and the significance and impact to your company.
Basic Email
At the most basic level Microsoft Exchange and Outlook differ from Google Apps in the handling of emails. Exchange and Outlook and OWA all treat emails individually. Google treats them as all part of a conversation. The nature of Outlook and the single message interface compels the user to “quote” the “Original Message” allowing the other side to follow the context of the message and thus understand the reply. Since Google displays both the current message and all prior messages involved (and send/received by this user) with the same subject then it is not necessary to quote – in fact Google suppresses the quoted text and users are encouraged to view the message above for reference instead of an “Original Message” block.
Searching and the management of emails is also affected. In a search Microsoft returns a stack of individual emails to browse. Google puts them together into conversations to browse. Marking and archiving of emails is also faster with Google conversations as they can be marked all together rather than sorting and searching for the entire collection in Outlook and managing individually.
Sorting email is also a good tool for management of the information within. Most advanced email users will categorize emails in various ways. Google’s webmail interface allows messages to be automatically or manually sorted using Labels, Stars or the archive. Google also has enhancements called Labs that offer further help. Automatic sorting can also be done with filters. Similarly outlook allows users to use colours, flags and folders to organize emails. Outlook’s “Rules and Alerts” provide a very thorough and complex automation infrastructure for incoming emails. In a feature by feature comparison the automation in Outlook is quite superior to Google – but this may change over time as Google and Outlook provide further changes and updates. It should be noticed however that Google “Labels” are the same as Outlook’s “Folders” and via the Google Exchange link they are converted exactly as that.
Searching email is possible in both systems – however it can clearly be seen in a side by side comparison that Google searches are much faster and much easier to work with. Outlook does provide a more comprehensive search criteria system – but this also makes it far more complex and it is always slower when required to search large volumes of email. As said above Google also returns full conversations of emails instead of individual ones thus making it easier to follow not just the individual email but the entire flow of the conversation before and after that email. With respects to the search speeds – Outlook can take Minutes to search for a block of text in all messages – Google requires only seconds to return the same information.
The Webmail Interface for Exchange Server is essentially a feature reduced down version of Outlook. Most of the basic and some of the more advanced features are provided. It is an impressive piece of technology. Strangely though it behaves very differently depending on which web browser you use. It is specifically designed for Internet Explorer and works very well. But under Firefox, Chrome and Safari the interface is reduced offering less features and is generally more awkward to use.
Google’s webmail interface is more advanced primarily because it is considered to be the primary interface. It takes full advantage of a technology called AJAX which allows nearly all of the programming and activity to occur at the browser. This provides an exceptional interface with rapid and comfortable response to the users input. Google has gone beyond and made special attempts to ensure the users interface is not bogged down by tired tasks such as uploading attachments and sending large files. It also offers good error responses to indicate when problems are occurring. Google may not always be able to recover – but generally the user’s experience is very good. The Google interface is not specifically designed to be the same as any other prior interface so one of the drawbacks is getting used to it and finding the features you need to use. Several helper programs called Labs can provide shortcuts and special features to assist the user.
Despite several years of providing webmail interfaces such as Hotmail and Yahoo – no other provider has produced one that is as well thought out and well executed as the Google webmail system.
Smartphone Email usage in Canada is very popular. All current Smartphone’s offer nearly all the same program components and modules as Outlook and almost the full suite of applications in Office. The feature set is obviously reduced to fit the device. Getting current data onto the devices has recently become simpler via smarter wireless sync and faster cell phone networks.
Both Enterprise programs offer methods for having data synchronize to the phone without wires. Each phone operating system however requires a different program deployed to the phone or to the network to accomplish the task.
For Blackberry the email is managed at a server and delivered to the blackberry via the PIN-to-PIN connection. This can be enhanced using a Blackberry Enterprise Server married with exchange server to provide calendar, contacts, memos and tasks along with email. The Google BES is a very strong service and provides probably the best synchronization interface to the blackberry platform. Google instead provides a Google Sync plug-in phone application on the blackberry. This polls and pulls the changed data to and from the blackberry on a schedule set on the phone. The Google sync is not as robust as the Blackberry Enterprise Server – even if both provide the same basic services.
On Windows Mobile Edition phones the Microsoft Exchange Server also provides a very good interface directly within Microsoft Exchange itself. This is not surprising. Google’s answer to Microsoft Mobile Edition is to again provide a program that runs on the phone and pulls data when available or sometimes when requested.
Google has recently launched Android operating system installed on selected Smartphone’s and provided a smart interface to connect directly to the Google mail servers. Unfortunately, access to exchange server for an Android phone is via wired sync to Outlook at the desktop only and hence is not really comparable to the other phones. But this technology promises to be comparable to the tight integration of Blackberry and Windows mobile smart-phones to the Exchange Server environment.
Wrapping up
The truth is your office needs email services. You may also need a server and network to support the office. Getting an Enterprise email service is a moderate investment that is within reach of most offices. If you are considering using Microsoft Exchange server as your implementation it is worthwhile to review Google Apps email services before you proceed. If you are a small office with Standard Email it is in your best interest to review Google Apps as a strong enhancement for a little extra investment.
ellwood associates inc generally recommends and supports both the exchange environment and the Google environment. Given the current available pros and cons we tend to recommend Google Apps instead of Microsoft Exchange. However each office has specific needs and either could prove to be best fit your office.
For more information please call us at ellwood associates. We will work with you to put you in the most effective and efficient environment.
Reader Comments (1)
Very interesting and informative post. I didn't know that much about emails. Thanks for sharing such a useful information.
email fax