Q: (from Allison)

I’m proposing Exchange Online (future option for Office 365) to a 25 seat customer and they have a GMail champion in-house. I think Exchange is the better solution, but I need to offer more supporting evidence so it doesn’t end up being a religious discussion between me and the GMail guy. Help?

A:

This is very important in defining the customer’s future with you. If you loose control of the email solution, you potentially loose the rest of the server and ultimately the desktop future as well. Here are two resources I would like to direct your attention to:

• Our compete website: WhyMicrosoft.com.
  This site provides competitive information on Google, IBM, Cisco, OpenOffice, and Salesforce.com for their respective product categories.
• A blog posting by Ed Bott on ZDNet: Gmail or Exchange? Six questions to help you make the right choice
  I would recommend reviewing the article and discussing the questions with your customer:
• Do you want a store-and-forward server or one that syncs your messages in the cloud?
• Do you need a custom domain?
• Do you plan to use Microsoft Outlook?
• Are you willing to pay? If so, how much?
• How good is the spam filtering?
• Do you need human support?

  Steve