Email for Small Office - 3 PC's

[Spapro]

Just wondering what people do for email in a small office - 3 computers all receiving and sending emails from a 'sales@' email address.

We currently use Outlook 2010 installed locally on each PC, accessing our email hosting by pop3 and using Ablebits BCC to blind copy the emails sent to the other PC's - then have rules setup in Outlook so the blind copy emails get filed in the sent folder on each receiving PC.

Works fine but is starting to feel a bit stuck together with gaffer tape !

So, for a small office with 3 PC's all wanting to send emails via the one email account, and be able to see emails sent by other users on the other PC's whats a good solution? Not sure if just moving to IMAP is the answer, never used IMAP before.

 

[WebDesires]

Yes use IMAP - that way all machines basically access the same inbox, can see each others marked important and etc and see any read / unread and can see sent emails and etc. It's basically like what you have now but everyone interacts with the same inbox "live" (sort of).

 

[WESH.UK]

Hi Spapro

Just change all of them to IMAP and problem solved. No more need to be forwarding things around or BCC'ing each other.

 

[KM-Tiger]

IMAP will allow you to manage that better.

You will need to ensure that sent emails go into a shared folder, or better still into the same folder and use a threaded view, so everyone can see the whole conversation, incoming and replies.

Some things will depend on the IMAP server's capabilities. Some can do 'Shared Seen State' so each user can see whether an incoming email has been read or not.

The other thing worth knowing about IMAP is there is no limit to the number of connected clients. So if you want to see what's going on on your phone, you can.

 

[Inva]

You might want to look into ticketing systems, as lacking that there is no really good solution to this.

With what you have currently, each person sending email to you (aka client) should be assigned a contact and then this contact will be talking to said client through their personal company email: person@company and not the generic one like info@company

No need to CC anyone, in each relevant workstation add the mail account and they will receive the emails (won't have the sent ones if they are from other workstations). Then you will communicate between the 3 of you "hey i replied to X email".

I predict that if you convert to IMAP you will regret it very quickly.

 

[Mark Dodds]

What's wrong with using something like Office 365 or G Suite?

This will also remove having end of life Office software in Jan 2020

 

[ServWise]

Another option not mentioned is that of having personal email accounts e.g. john@ jane@ bob@ etc and then having sales@ as an alias which is setup on the mail server and essentially sends all emails to all three mailboxes and you then don't get the problem of mails being set to read or accidentally deleted by other users. Maybe something to think about.

 

[ffox]

What's wrong with using something like Office 365 or G Suite?

Another vote of O365/G-Suite.

If you should decide O365, don't go for the basic Business Plan as that one doesn't include Exchange on-line email.

With Exchange you don't need to use aliases for email as you can set up as many group (shared) mail boxes as you want at no extra charge. Each mail box has its own unique email address, so Sales@, Admin@, Info@, Purchasing@ etc. Join the licenced users to each group as appropriate. Very secure.

G-Suite can't handle group mail boxes.

 

[KM-Tiger]

personal email accounts e.g. john@ jane@ bob@ etc and then having sales@ as an alias which is setup on the mail server and essentially sends all emails to all three mailboxes

You don't need to do that.

You can have a sales@ mailbox, then allow john, jane, and bob to subscribe to it.

Procedure could be that whoever 'takes' an incoming email moves it to another folder. Thus no confusion.

 

[ServWise]

You don't need to do that.

You can have a sales@ mailbox, then allow john, jane, and bob to subscribe to it.

Yes that is how they do it now, but some prefer to have their own copy of the emails for a number of reasons.

Procedure could be that whoever 'takes' an incoming email moves it to another folder. Thus no confusion.

Have you ever tried to get people to all 'follow' a procedure. But hey I was just offering an alternative method of working that I prefer but it is all a preference and depends on how your particular business functions.

 

[EmC007]

Another vote for 365. Talk to someone and get it done.

 

[Spapro]

Thanks for all the advice guys, been away this week and busy before that, sorry for not responding earlier.

Will have a think and look into Office 365 I think.

 

[Graham Tyers]

I have a few decent mail servers if you want a few imap mailboxes and a webmail facility.

 

[Mark Dodds]

The office 365 license you go for would depend on how you are going to setup your email addresses etc. You’ll obviously need to setup your domain name in office 365 which involve some DNS changes so you’ll need access to your domain name hosting provider.

The quickest way to move your existing email into office 365 would be to make sure Office is set to download all email, then export the email into a PST. When office 365 has been configured and a new account has been setup inside outlook import the PST into that account.

I’d advise you to purchase licences that include the latest office software so you avoid the January 2020 issue where Microsoft are making some of their software end of life which includes office 2010. As a side note this also includes windows 7 so if you’ve still got machines with this then I’d recommend you upgrade or replace to windows 10.

I don’t know what you do for file and folder storage but if you started to use and pay for office 365 it would be worth using OneDrive etc to be able to access your documents wherever you are. If you did do this I’d advise you to use a cloud to cloud backup provider to backup your office 365 data as to avoid the misconception that if your data is in the cloud it’s backed up.

Depending on what your business is your are able to use a whole raft of products within office 365 including Teams which is an instant messaging platform that can also integrate your business documents. Teams is something that Microsoft are constantly changing and pushing. I believe that Teams will act as the centralised hub for a business in the future including VoIP, document storage, groups and also removing the need to email as often, it can also be used to collaborate with external contractors/businesses.

Hope that helps!!!

 

[ffox]

@Mark Dodds while I agree wholeheartedly with most of what you say, I have to pick up on a couple of points.

First, unless there is a really pressing reason for the use of locally installed Office products, there is no need to pay for them, or install them. Outlook Web App (OWA) actually works better in many respects than a locally installed Outlook client. The web apps for Word and Excel are also faster to launch and easier to use with O365 than the locally installed client software.

It is true that the Office web apps do not support the range of functionality available in the, paid for, locally installed applications, but for the vast majority of users they are certainly more than a match for the job.

Second, if Office web apps are employed, the user is freed from the need to use a Microsoft device. The web apps work fine on almost any computer, or device. So, Linux, Android or Apple, as well as legacy Windows machines can be used for email, document creation, editing, storage, etc.

A more important facet of O365 purchase is to ensure that the plan includes SharePoint as this is the engine behind Teams and all other data storage in the platform.

O365 plan selection will, of course, be determined by the need of the business in question, but I always include recommendation into close examination of the need for local Office application software, user and device operational needs (why provider a user with an expensive PC when a low cost tablet will do the job?), and lastly, what data storage is needed by the business.

 

[Mark Dodds]

I’d agree with using the web versions but I wouldn’t agree with just jumping into it, I’ve found with our clients there needs to be a period of transition and user training from the locally installed to the web versions.

 

[EmC007]

You would certainly benefit from talking with someone that knows the Office 365 range.