Hello IT bods, I wonder if you can help?

My organisation, runs a fairly typical windows setup (mix of windows 7 and 8 and Office 2010 and 2013), though not running exchange. Our emails are POP3 and hosted via a 3rd party. Our calendars however are (where it works) still using the old windows live accounts, and this is where the problem is.

Windows Live is no longer supported in Windows 8 / Outlook 2013, so those machines are unable to share calendars, likewise, if you run Skype, windows keeps getting confused if you have a different Skype address to what would have been your old calendar login.

So, my argument has been we need to move to hosted exchange as I know this works well, however there is resistance due to cost of getting 30 odd users on it. What other options are there, I though maybe a google calendars, but then someone said that it you would have to attach a file to the email, instead of just setting up mettings etc… So any other solutions that work seamlessly with outlook?

thank you

Google Apps will integrate with Outlook clients acting as an exchange server. Don’t use it with Outlook myself, so can’t comment on how well that works, but my phone and calendar on my mac are configured to use it as an exchange server and that all works well.

Edit: what your colleague said may have been when accessing over IMAP, I think over exchange it would be ok.

I shall google google apps calendar in that case.. The solution we need needs to be kid proof, (though the contract IT bloke will set it up for everyone..

ooh, just looking at that – can you set up your current email address without changing hosts? as it looks like it does mimic an exchange server almost?

With the paid google apps, yes. You just get your domain MX records to point at the google servers. Google apps handles the email for my domain. Been a while since I did it, but I think it was fairly easy.

Edit: Oh and I’m not really an IT bod but it was easy enough for me to do. I did host my own mail server for a while and that was a PITA so happy to pay google a few quid to host it. I’m also pretty much a one man band so migration was easy, just copied all my mail into a local folder, changed my email settings, then moved it all over to the new google hosted version.

do you think it’s likely that you could get away with having 4 paid apps, then using the non paid version for the office based staff? just thinking about the different devices 4 of us use vs everyone else?

How much screwing around with it do you want to do, and what’s your time worth? £2.60 pp/pm and it could be in Office 365, Outlook talking to real Exchange and doing everything how you’d expect.

tis not me paying the bills, i’m not really even supposed to be looking into it! However with all things annoying, stuff like this not working, it’s in my interest to steer people in the right direction. Personally, i’d go hosted exchange and have done with it, but the bill payer is tight!

the non paid version for the office based staff?

As far as I know the calendar won’t work for those not using the paid version. I had to buy an add-on to do it but that was painful and didn’t work well so we just gave up on it in the end and use calendars online instead.

mleh, that’s my idea oout the window then

Take the opportunity to drop outlook?

steady there, you’ll give the owners a heart attack with stupid talk like that….. 8)