Such a prediction came our way today from the analysts at Gartner
We’d have said “I don’t think so” not all that long ago. Whoops! We did say that
It’s just that a different army of fanbois will launch an attack in the comments section, and the previous lot will instead defend your position. But we digress, which isn’t all that unusual either.
We recently assisted a small business client to move from internally hosted Exchange Server based email, to Google’s GMail for his whole company, which although small, has five branches spread across the eastern seaboard.
The move was prompted by the imminent opening of the fifth branch, and the reluctance of the managing director to fork out for another Exchange licence. That, coupled with our reluctance to install the thing on yet another standalone server, meant the GMail option was starting to look good.
In case you’re wondering why we didn’t just have one super Exchange server back at head office, the answer is dollars. The most affordable way to get both Windows Sever and SQL Server is to buy Microsoft’s Small Business Server package, but there’s a gotcha.
SBS won’t play nicely with other iterations of SBS. For that you need standard Windows Server and standard SQL Server and they cost lots more money. Microsoft claims the restriction isn’t a problem because you can use VPNs and only have one server in the head office. We’ve got the VPNs.
In practice, you can’t get affordable reliable DSL links outside the capital cities, so the branch offices suffer lots of outages if they rely on the available ADSL to get all their data from the head office. We’ve been there and done that. So, standalone servers work best in practice for this company, but nobody wants to manage Exchange server in the five to ten user branches. And then Google offered GMail.
With a few clicks the whole company has email with the same domain names on the end, and they can all access their email from home or on the road, without any intervention by IT support people. For those who were already addicted to Outlook, we left them using it, but for new accounts we just pointed them to the website.
The Gartnerus were right this time. The future does indeed look very cloudy.
-1.jpg&w=100&c=1&s=0)
.png&w=100&c=1&s=0)
