Back to Technology Management

In addition to these office applications you will need e-mail functionality. It is strongly recommended that you do not settle for Outlook Express. There are a number of good low or no-cost alternatives. Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent client for several reasons. As well as providing outstanding e-mail capability, Thunderbird allows you to subscribe to and use newsgroups natively and even has the ability to manage RSS news feeds.

A longer explanation about the security reasons for switching to Thunderbird can be found at the Secure Surfing Organization.

It has some of the best spam virus filtering in the business. It has group functionality to facilitate collaboration and web mail interface for accessing on the road or from home. For seven bucks a month it really is a lot of power. But the most important business consideration still comes down to stability, reliability and availability. But using the services of a dedicated provider, such as Walking Dolphins itself or one of the many alternatives, you do not need to worry about power outages leaving your e-mail addresses unreachable. You don’t need to hire technical support staff to maintain the system and work out the glitches that creep in. You just need to do your business and communicate comfortably with your own domain.
Why do I emphasize this aspect so much? Some businesses are convinced not only to have separate e-mail clients but to install their own e-mail servers. This is almost always a fool’s errand. Remember the principle of not reinventing the wheel and make use of those who have already cracked this nut.

Operating, maintaining, securing and updating e-mail servers (or most any server) is a complex business. If you are not in the business of providing e-mail services why would you want to reinvent that particular wheel?  There are very few cases where you will not be much better served by subscribing to an e-mail service that employs dedicated technical staff to keep things running, that manage backup servers, that earn their keep by keeping you communications working.

Assuming you do not have a direct need for hosting your own server, you then need to decide if you need to have a local e-mail client such as Thunderbird or PegasusMail. Pegasus is a very fully featured no-cost mail client that makes it easy to do things like create mailing lists of your customers and even includes the native ability for mail merging. But I have seen some users overwhelmed by the breadth of capabilities so your mileage may vary.

For small businesses of all sizes, Thunderbird is a fully appropriate solution.

And that in combination with the fact that Walking Dolphins offers packages at prices that are close enough to free as not worth bothering the bookkeeper. For example, you do not have to go with the Exchange Server package, particularly if you are not wed to Outlook. Instead you can sign up for web hosting at a rate less than the cost of your time just to research the options.

5. Collaboration
6. Do Real World Testing
Back to Technology Management