E-mail is an integral part of the workplace, as well as customer and public relations. Optimize it.
Most of our customers consider email to be absolutely indispensable. It provides a time stamped, searchable journal of some of your most important communications, complete with attachments. It is critical to keep your email accessible and free of viruses and spam, so that you can fully harness this essential tool. For some of our clients, it is equally important to archive and retain that email for many years. We can support a wide variety of mail systems, although we recommend only two of them.
While email is a powerful tool, it becomes qualitatively more useful when combined with calendars and contact lists. And still more useful when these resources can be shared with colleagues. Other applications such as tasks, notes, documents, forms, or even internal websites, can all be folded into the same system of user accounts and and data management. In short, this is groupware, and groupware is even more useful than email.
Polaris IT Solutions can examine your current e-mail system and help you determine how to optimize it, or how to transition to a full groupware solution. We recommend two different systems because they represent two fundamentally different approaches to providing the groupware solution. The conventional approach is to use Microsoft Exchange, which is the premier groupware server software. It's an excellent choice for small businesses that want a lot of functionality at a reasonable cost, while maintaining total internal control of the data and backups. On the other hand, the cloud-based approach that Google has implemented is very capable, quite flexible and relatively inexpensive.
Both Microsoft Exchange and Google Apps Premium are both well supported on a wide variety of mobile devices, and impressively functional on smartphones. Unsurprisingly, the best Google Apps Premium support comes in smartphones that use the Android OS (by Google). And ironically, the best Microsoft Exchange access is still provided by Apple's iPhone, though that will probably change when Microsoft releases Windows Mobile 7 (real soon now).
We can also integrate your office telephone system with your groupware solution, which is termed Universal Communication, as we have done for several clients. And we can provide audio and video conferencing solutions as part of that same infrastructure. We like to turn challenges into solutions.
