Solo Technology

I’m pondering switching the office over to hosted email. Our Exchange server is very out of date and a bit of a pain. Seems like maybe letting someone else deal with config, maintenance and backups — not to mention spam measures — would be easier.

I’m proposing the Gmail Apps solution.

I’ll need to plan a bit on how to “spin” this for the owners and am open to ideas. I’m definitely going to hit the availability, backups and anti-spam features. Anything else I should stress? (I should point out that my boss is not opposed and is one of the owners).

Would like to write more, but my primary home machine didn’t survive the storm that blew through here. Seems like the power supply is dead. Going to swap that out as soon as I click “Publish.”

I saw a sweet little funnel forming over the local muni airport on my way home though! Wow, was like being back in South Dakota for a minute there…

2 Responses to “Hosted Email and Dead Computer”

1. Peter on May 15th, 2007 1:04 am
   

   Re: I’ll need to plan a bit on how to “spin” this for the owners and am open to ideas. I’m definitely going to hit the availability, backups and anti-spam features. Anything else I should stress?

   Try to quantify the amount of resources spent supporting the current email infrastructure. Perhaps if the owner could see the cost associated with dedicated support person(s) vs. the cost of the hosted solution, the decision would be easier. It is likely that the yearly subscription rate for Google hosted email is cheaper than a couple people supporting Exchange and its ancillary systems. Add licensing and hardware costs to that too, the decision gets even easier…

2. Chris on May 15th, 2007 10:01 am
   

   Good stuff Peter, thanks for the reminders.

   Computer Update:
   Not the power supply (tried 2 additional ones).
   Not the video card.
   Not memory.
   Not drives.

   Reseated the CPU. That wasn’t it. Didn’t appear charred… but not ruling it out yet I guess. That, basically, leaves the mobo.

   Ugh. Replacing that means replacing cpu, video (bye-bye AGP!) and memory. That $ound$ $pendy.

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