Email Hosting Services for a Small to Medium Sized Office?

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I am a part-time system administrator at a law firm with approximately 8 employees.

Currently, the office's email uses msn / outlook.com as the back end, and Outlook 2007 as the desktop front end.

Outlook Connector acts as the bridge between outlook 2007 and outlook.com.

Due to the high volume of emails the office receives, at least two email accounts have exceeded the maximum number/size of emails that the free outlook.com back-end provides.

In addition, the bridge provided by "outlook connector" is flaky.

I am looking to move us away from outlook.com as the back end, for obvious reasons. I need an email hosting provider that does the following:

Provides a good web interface.
Reasonably priced.
The ability to let us use our own domain name so we can make email addresses like Josh@lawDDD.com, rather than Josh@msn.com
Uses standard mail interface so workers in the office can connect to the backend with their phones.
Ample storage so at least 7 years of high volume emails can be stored without a problem.

Any suggestions? I don't have any experience with email hosting.

Thanks!

JoshuaD

Posted 2014-11-20T18:22:40.257

Reputation: 733

Answers

Office365 or Google Apps is my recommendation - costs for the lower end packages are ~$5/user and it fits all your requirements.

Given your users current experience with Outlook, Office365 would be best.

PhillipHolmes

Posted 2014-11-20T18:22:40.257

Reputation: 219

Outlook can be used with Office 365 or Google Apps equally well. I don't think you can say Office 365 is best because Outlook is being used. With all the other requirements being equal, your decision will be primarily if you want to use Outlook for Web Access (OWA) or Google Apps. You might sit down with 8 employees and see which web interface works best for them and go from there. Only advantage Office 365 has is the ability to use OneDrive and have that integrated with Office applications. Google Drive can somewhat do this, but not a well as a native Microsoft application. – Sun – 2014-11-20T21:58:43.873

Google Apps's calendar integration still isn't quite 'there' - if the company I'm working at wasn't using Mac's (different issues with Office365 and the enterprise version of OneDrive) then we would use O365 just for the calendar integration capabilities. – PhillipHolmes – 2014-11-21T22:05:31.720

Can you be more specific regarding calendaring integration advantages with Office 365? And since the op is not using exchange... Does it apply? – Sun – 2014-11-21T22:57:19.370