Interesting piece about Gartner advising business to consider Webmail as a viable cost effective alternative. We at Cobweb say - great news - Gartner are endorsing the IT model that we have been delivering since 2001 - but wait a moment, are they seriously suggesting that businesses should use Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail for their mission critical communications medium? Managing mail for over 5000 business customers I think we have a good idea of the needs of the sub 1000 user organization and there are 3 things these customers need great support, great support and great support.
Of course they also need mobility options, Blackberry, Windows mobile, Iphone, also compliant archiving as well as flexible migration scenarios, simple and complex mail routing and an array of other technical features, but, most importantly they need to know that they can access high quality support in way they want to, when they want to.
It is also important to recognise that different roles in any business require different features, deskless workers may or may not need offline working, office users may need interoperability with other office systems such as CRM or ERP solutions. So yes I agree - businesses under 1000 users should not deploy internal mail systems, but, as they outsource - do the due diligence and find a provider that meets their own individual needs, and my guess is that not many of them will opt for Hotmail!
See the Computer Weekly artical here
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