Office 365 - Is it right for your small business?
Office 365 – Is it right for your small business?
If you’ve looked for email options for your small business, it’s likely that you’ve come across Office 365 by Microsoft. Office 365 is a subscription service offering communication and collaboration tools for businesses large and small. While the list of features is impressive, most small businesses initially investigate Office 365 just for the email service.
In this post and the video below, I investigate the email service offered by Office 365 and also how easy it is to create a simple website within your Office 365 account using their Public Site feature.
Most people who use Office 365 for business email will retrieve their email in a few different ways.
Downloading the Outlook application and running it on your computer. You’ll need Office 365 Small Business Premium or higher to have access download Outlook to your computer.
Most email hosting services will give you access to POP and IMAP mail servers to easily setup email on any email client. I couldn’t find the POP and IMAP server settings for Office 365 within my account.
I asked the Office 365 chat support where to look and the agent told me to search the help section for the answer and said I needed to setup Exchange Online. I searched the help and didn’t find anything.
I tested these mail servers in Windows Live Mail and was able to connect to my Office 365 account and send/receive mail.
At the time of writing this, you can get Office 365 Small Business for $5/user/month. That means you’ll pay $5 per email address. And you can see the upgrade prices in the image below.
So how does that price compare to the competition?
Godaddy offers a similar service hosted by Office 365 for $3.99/user currently. I believe that’s just email and doesn’t include some of the other tools shown below from the official Office 365 website.
Google Apps for Business, another popular option for business email is currently $5/user/month also.
Don’t forget – with Office 365, you are getting more than just email service. You’re getting a bunch of collaboration tools and Office software that I didn’t cover in the video above. Many small businesses won’t use these features and are only looking for email, but they can be extremely valuable for some small businesses.
Read more about other email options for small businesses. CLICK HERE.