Ok so the battle has been building up and…. there are many options a business can take when looking to deploy Core technology, especially starting from scratch. The main concern in this discussion is the hosted options. This means there is no need for on premise servers, and therefore the cost that goes for managing them. For now anyway I will assume I have a 8 seater start-up company that has no money for hardware, and a hosted solution fits perfectly as we all have our own laptops.

 

Firstly – The disclaimer : In the days of everyone suing everyone else I thought it would be prudent to state that this blog post is in no way a representation of any company I work for, or designed to fault any other product, it is merely an indication as to what steps I have encountered during my own personal set up of these services and may not represent the experience of others.

 

Now that’s out the way lets have a look at the options:

 

Microsoft BPOS

Google Apps
Email Exchange GMail
Calendar Exchange Google Calendar
Collaboration Sharepoint Google sites
Office Work Office Google Docs
IM Office Communicator Google Talk beta
Other Live Meeting Google Video
 
So now lets have a look at the specs for the Premier accounts: (The standard accounts are difficult to compare as only include mail and calendar for Google, but are modular for BPOS)
 

Microsoft BPOS

Google Apps
Default Mailbox Size 5Gb 25Gb
Max Mailbox Size 25Gb 25Gb
SLA uptime 99.9% 99.9%
Annual Cost $120 $50
Phone support 24/7 24/7
     
Its worth noting at this point that based on the SLA uptime, both have a different way of repaying downtime. 
Google Apps will give you more time free based on the length of time you were down for. IE a recent downtime of 3 days was rewarded with 15 days service free.
Microsoft will reimburse your costs based on the length of time you were down for. IE money back
 
So BPOS:
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GApps:
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