As a startup, we don't have time or money to waste on setting up complex infrastructure. Mail servers are notoriously complex. At DataScaler, we wanted to hit the ground running, but also have an email system that would grow with us. Shared calendaring was also a must-have. Even with only four people, it's amazing how many schedule conflicts can arise without shared calendaring.
We found Google Apps to be a great fit. It uses the familiar Gmail user interface and has solid calendaring. Everything resides under the datascaler.com domain, so our email addresses are all @datascaler.com. At only $50 per user per year for 10GB of email storage, it's served us well. It's never been unavailable or had any hiccups. We can easily invite each other to meetings and manage email.
We also use the Docs & Spreadsheets app from time to time. It's not exactly Microsoft Office, though. It is a bit slow to use over the Internet and cannot import certain documents. We use it mostly for notepad-type items, but we'll likely move those over to our wiki. At a prior company, we used a hosted Microsoft Exchange system, but almost 10x more expensive. After years of using MS Exchange, I don't miss it at all.
We're an all-Mac shop, so we use Spanning Sync to keep our Google Calendars in sync with iCal on our MacBook Pros. This has worked well for us and the product is also quite inexpensive at $25 per year or $65 forever.
Another key advantage to using Google Apps is that it requires no VPN. Since our email is on the internet, it's always available from anywhere. Between Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, Skype, eFax, Unfuddle, and a few other apps, we are able to run our business quite well without any servers in our office. We never need a VPN and we don't have to purchase, house, power, and cool a bunch of servers. As a frequent business traveler, I have come to loathe VPNs, which never seem to be able to connect when you need them to. The Web truly is a wonderful thing.
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