Hello all

In the process of starting up a small company and wanted to know if anybody has experience in setting up a cloud based email system?

Initially there will be 3 of us working ad hoc / part time but if the moon’ align it may see good growth in terms of employes required.

What should I consider / definitely not consider?

Money will be tight during start up so low cost options get double points!!

Thanks in advance!!!

Google

We use freeagent for the 2 of us, suits creative industries. We’ve found a few restrictions but I think all the alternatives have too. Best to get a free trial of a few. Helps if your account uses it too, if not you’ll have to export stuff to them which defeats the point

Use 365, it’s not expensive at £3-£4 per person, per month (£8 or so if you want the office suite too).

Oops miss read. Have a recommendation for booking software anyway.
Google for email (drive is very useful too as no need to invest in a server / network

Office 365 or G Suite.

Depends if you want the MS apps/experience or the Google Apps experience.

Either will work fine with iOS and Android.

Either will work fine in a browser.

Either will work fine with a desktop client.

Great U.K. company

https://www.tsohost.com/

Google

Amazon hosted email on AWS?

I’ve set this up for my Mrs, havehav had any problems with it at all

I would go Office365 even though it’s not free. As well as the email you get 1TB of data each as well as shared file areas,  office programs, task management etc. It saves you loads of hassle sorting out file sharing, backups etc. If you lose a machine you can get back up and running in no time

Great U.K. company

https://www.tsohost.com/

Aweful UK Company, had to move the other half off them after they acquired 5quidhost and made the service super unreliable.

G Suite here – it’s a bit cheaper than 365 (even the version without any office apps – you pay lots more if you want those). But then I’m an unashamed Google fan, and I’ve previously set up the local school on it so it was familiar and hence a no brainer.

I’m not quite sure what’s allowed regarding this sort of thing on the STW forum, but if you do go with G Suite I have a code which will give you 20% off your first year (so it’s then only £2.64 per user per month for the basic version). PM me if that’s OK.

Yeah, Google for business works pretty well.

I’m constantly amazed at how well Gmail filters the spam before it gets to me – how does Microsoft compare?

We use Microsofts offering. The £3 a month option we use for the general company emails and all the email clients see the mail in this account. (We have several alias addresses for this account for different aspects of the business). If you decide to go for business premium (£8 option) there are lots of options for business help (form and survey generation for client use, team communication, CRM for example). Some of the features are Windows only though which is galling you’re a Mac using office.

Their tech support was helpful and quick when it came to wrangling DNS changes and getting the one PC in the office to behave.

Email in profile if you want any specific help (it’s one of my many hats).

I know you can do a free trial of O365 business premium if you want to try it:

https://signup.microsoft.com/Signup?OfferId=467eab54-127b-42d3-b046-3844b860bebf&dl=O365_BUSINESS_PREMIUM&culture=en-GB&country=GB&ali=1

Zoho worth looking at.

Okay I use both Office 365 & Google for business and they are both good but Google is just that little bit better. I’ve set this up for a number of friends and it’s cheap and easy and makes working cloud based super easy and efficient.

365 is good also but just a bit clunky and the whole docs and shared drive isn’t as good. (IMO)

Other tools we use are

Tickspot for Timesheets

Slack for messages

Hubspot as a CRM (prefer it to Zoho but Zoho is good also)

and Trello for task management.

Scaleable top quality infrastructure for a few quid a month 🙂

Whatever you use try to setup a proper domain name. Nothing screams small business more than a @gmail.com email address.

Google

I doubt you get the same level of support from google as you would with microsoft. I work at a University that is moving from gmail to 0365. One of the reasons is the google support is rubbish

I doubt you get the same level of support from google as you would with microsoft.

Google support is excellent. Real (helpful) people on the end of a phone. Don’t confuse their free products with their paid for services.

one thing to bear in mind is that you need to check the terms and conditions carefully, if you use free versions of tools like Trello, anything you upload becomes their Intellectual Property if you aren’t using the paid versions; make sure you set up the service in a secure way, O365 and Google have online tutorials on how to do this (also have a think about backup of the data) so use as much of the Gsuite or 365 as you can before venturing onto lots of platforms.

good luck with your new venture!

If you are looking at more than just email, then the O365 Business Premium suite has a bunch of other stuff – full info at

https://products.office.com/en-gb/business/office-365-business-premium

trailwagger wrote:

Whatever you use try to setup a proper domain name. Nothing screams small business more than a @gmail.com email address.

I thought that went without saying – if you weren’t setting up your own domain then there’s no obvious reason to pay as free Gmail would do the job. Though I’m not sure about your use of “small business” in a negative way – small business here and proud of it, plenty of small businesses doing things in a professional way (with their own domain).

5thElefant wrote:

Google support is excellent. Real (helpful) people on the end of a phone. Don’t confuse their free products with their paid for services.

I’ve no idea what sort of support you’d need – once it’s working it just works, I’ve never felt the need for support beyond FAQs and online instructions on my personal account, nor on the Google for education system I set up for the school (which has more users than our own company is ever likely to have). Though personally I had a problem with setup which was all my own fault (messed up allocating domain names) and it was resolved quickly and easily via text chat.

Google

^yes. This. Sorted. Simples.
Plus get everyone Android phones.