The Days of an Exchange Server are Over for Contractors

My dad’s small con­tract­ing busi­ness pays $4,000 a year or more for IT sup­port, just to have an MS Exchange Serv­er. Every time he talks to his IT com­pa­ny about going to the clouds, they give him out­ra­geous quotes of all the things he’ll need to do to switch, with a hefty price tag. Real­ly? It isn’t that dif­fi­cult to switch. With Google ser­vices firm­ly lead­ing the pack in cloud com­put­ing for busi­ness­es (and Microsoft’s MS 360° com­ing soon), more and more busi­ness­es are mov­ing to these ser­vices every day. It makes sense! If you are a small busi­ness, and you spend $200 – 400 dol­lars a month on main­te­nance for a phys­i­cal serv­er or email host­ing, you are sim­ply pay­ing too much. Apple Isn’t Much Help Either My dad is just about ready to make the switch to toss his exchange serv­er and phys­i­cal serv­er in the recy­cling box (yes, that was a polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect term). Yet before he switched, he decid­ed to go and talk to Apple. Why not! They are inno­v­a­tive and big into cloud com­put­ing too. Apple isn’t stu­pid either. They want to sell more hard­ware and soft­ware, like Microsoft. They referred him to a third par­ty IT com­pa­ny who sets up Apple cloud servers. Though switch­ing to the clouds is nei­ther dif­fi­cult nor expen­sive, IT and com­put­er com­pa­nies are try­ing to cap­i­tal­ize on the small busi­ness own­ers who don’t know what to do. This Apple cer­ti­fied com­pa­ny gave my dad a quote of around $10,000 to switch from PC com­put­ers to Macs and have a cloud serv­er and office. $10,000 for 4 com­put­ers; I’m in the wrong busi­ness! I looked over the quote this morn­ing and all I saw was the same thing I’ve seen for years: tech talk for­eign lan­guage that makes no sense to busi­ness own­ers, topped off with a big price tag. Don’t get me wrong — they were not scam­ming him by over­charg­ing for their ser­vices. The hourly rates and all that were in line with what IT cost are these days. Yet I feel that their quote was not in my dad’s best inter­est. The quote includ­ed all kinds of irrel­e­vant extras, as well as items that he can get for free (or very cheap) else­where. His busi­ness is already using Google Apps for his email host­ing etc, but IT com­pa­nies don’t real­ly want you to use Google because they know they can’t make mon­ey on it. There isn’t any­thing for them to trou­bleshoot any­more. So What Should You Do When I fin­ished read­ing over the esti­mate for this new IT com­pa­ny, I sent off an email advis­ing my dad to put on the brakes. Whether he gets Macs or stays with PCs, I don’t care. The bot­tom line is he real­ly only needs the following: 

1. Google Apps for Busi­ness: Email, Cal­en­dar, Two Way-Exchange-like Sync­ing to iPhones/​Androids, Google Docs (get­ting bet­ter every month) and Con­tacts. A busi­ness can still use MS Out­look if they don’t want to use the Google User Interface.
2. A Cloud Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment Soft­ware that works well with Google. There are dozens to chose from. For the painter or remod­el­er out there, Pipeline Deals works great and has excel­lent goal and report­ing infor­ma­tion. $15 a month per user with mobile access. No brain­er. (For those who want less fea­tures, I use High­rise CRM. For those who want more… Sales­force, but that is very expensive)
3. Egnyte, which will do a two way sync with your files on your com­put­er. You can access those files from any com­put­er. You can take a lap­top with you in the field, pull up your email and Egnyte, and you’re good to go (a vir­tu­al office).
4. Google Chrome or Fire­fox Web Brows­er: don’t use any­thing else. Each one has a sync option. This means you can have a lap­top and desk­top with the exact same look and feel (book­marks, pass­word keep­ers etc).
5. Exter­nal Hardrives: This does­n’t hurt. I some­times back­up my Mac com­put­er on an exter­nal hard dri­ve just for the extra security.

What Does This Cost? •Pipeline Deals $15 a user per month •Google Apps for Busi­ness $50 a user per year (free ver­sion is just as good too, just less stor­age) •Egy­nte: Best pric­ing is prob­a­bly the 1 ter­abyte per month at $45 a month •Microsoft Office ($170+ each But if you want to save mon­ey, go to Google Docs or Try Open Office) •Set­up: depends on who you hire. $300‑1000 to set up Google Apps for Busi­ness is prob­a­bly a good faith esti­mate (depend­ing on who you hire). Egy­nte isn’t that hard to set­up and move files. Their free tech sup­port can guide you how to do that. What else is there? Train­ing and every now and then some IT sup­port, which is nor­mal. Things hap­pen. So, before pay­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to upgrade your office at the end of this year or go to the clouds, make sure you think care­ful­ly who you are hir­ing and why!