I haven't used Microsoft's own hosted Office365, though I have heard good things about that platform from some schools that are using it.
At the time I was evaluating moving our college from in-house email to hosted email, Microsoft still had a lot of unanswered questions about their Office365 for education product and although they were promising free email for students, they were NOT promising free email for staff, faculty, or alumni. Google offered free email, forever, for staff, faculty, students, and alumni. That was a big plus in their favor. Google had huge storage allotments, at the time, and now offers free, unlimited storage for educational accounts. We have some students with hundreds of gigs of data on Google Drive, for free. Microsoft NOW offers free email for staff and faculty, from what I understand, but I'm a Google Apps customer for life, unless they really screw something up beyond recovery. Microsoft has a number of up-sell opportunities for organizations that use them for hosted email. They're in it for the sales. I respect that but I recognize that their motivation is getting our money from subscriptions. Google, on the other hand, is a fabulously-successful advertising company. They get money from our eyeballs. They're out to get our searches, put ads in front of our eyeballs, and have us click on them (at which point they get paid from advertisers). Even when we don't click on their ads, we're using them for our searches and our browsing and they are getting information from us about what we like and what we do online. They use that information for more marketing. I respect their motivation and business model and I consider what they do a service to me that I can live with. Chris On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Raymond Beaudoin < [email protected]> wrote: > > I have used hosted Exchange with a few customers and have NOT had a > good experience with any hosted Exchange system, so far. I believe that > they CAN be run well, if you have a good company, keeping an eye on things, > keeping the system updated and checked, etc. I have so far not found a > hosted Exchange company that actually IS doing a good job. > > Does that include Microsoft's O365 platform? I've had the exact opposite > experience and would like to hear more about the other side of the fence. > > On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 1:21 PM, Chris McQuistion <[email protected] > > wrote: > >> I'm a big fan of Google Apps. I've been using it for Watkins, for the >> last several years and have transitioned several of my contract clients to >> Google Apps. It is the best hosted (or non-hosted) email system I've ever >> administered. >> >> I agree with the prevailing opinion here, that if you don't have a >> dedicated email administrator on your staff, you shouldn't be hosting your >> own email. Even if you DO have the staff and talent to administer your own >> email server, it is often better to leave that to a bigger hosting company >> that has hundreds or thousands of talented administrators running it 24/7 >> (like Google, for instance.) >> >> I have used hosted Exchange with a few customers and have NOT had a good >> experience with any hosted Exchange system, so far. I believe that they >> CAN be run well, if you have a good company, keeping an eye on things, >> keeping the system updated and checked, etc. I have so far not found a >> hosted Exchange company that actually IS doing a good job. >> >> Chris >> >> On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 12:29 PM, Michael Holley < >> [email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I was recently looking for email hosting providers and here are a few I >>> found that looked interesting: >>> 1. Rackspace >>> 2. ZoHo >>> 3. Microsoft (Exchange Online, Office 365) >>> 4. Registrar (NameCheap, GoDaddy, etc.) >>> 5. Shared hosting provider (BlueHost, DreamHost, Hostgator) >>> 6. Atmail >>> 7. Fastmail >>> 8. Hushmail >>> >>> Most these providers will charge $3-$6 per user per month. Some provide >>> a hosted Exchange while others only provide IMAP. Make sure to check what >>> your clients need/currently use for their email backend. Also a few, at >>> least one, has cheap to free options for small businesses (ZoHo) or may >>> have better pricing for non-profit organizations, so check on that too. >>> >>> >>> >>> On Jul 28, 2015, at 12:17 PM, Michael L <[email protected]> >>> wrote: >>> >>> Thank you, that makes sense. >>> >>> 1st two email providers that come to mind are google and yahoo ... any >>> other suggestions please. >>> >>> >>> >>> T-mobile. 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