We’ve come full CIRCLE. Our company used to run Microsoft Exchange servers in our offices in order to communicate with our partner clients (Remember those ‘good old days?). It was expensive and not easy. We saw the difficulty of MS email from our partner clients eyes and decided, let’s build something for our customers. We spent A LOT of money and time on servers from HP and software from Microsoft and built a hosted mail service. It was great but just not that stable for us. We’ll never forget those late nights. It just wasn’t good enough, and we concluded it was ‘mediocre’ Microsoft stuff.
After a lot of research, we found Zimbra. It was a lot more stable and better designed software to allow us to give our customer (and ourselves!) something more secure and robust than the huge Microsoft solution we had built out. After a lot of discussion, we migrated all our users to Bizmail (our hosted Microsoft service that is now Zimbra). A great decision all around. Even those addicted to Outlook could continue to use our services and servers as if it was MS in the background. Just install the Zimbra Outlook connector and they were good to go.
As time marched on, Google came out with their Google Workspace (then branded Google Apps), Zoho continued to expand their offerings in India and around the world, and Microsoft stuffed all the service providers using their software to host their customers. They rolled out Office 365 at prices lower than they were charging their resellers for license costs . Many firms ended up moving to Microsoft’s cloud as they were already using Word, Excel, Outlook and Google was a privacy risk. Although we had customers and some of our team on Zimbra, we took the MS bait and most of us moved to Microsoft Office 365.
As our company uses Zoho for our ERP and we found Microsoft a bit boring we decided to get everything on one platform. We all moved to Zoho mail to simplify things in 2018 (with a few internal exceptions). Zoho mail was fine and did mostly what Microsoft could do, but it was a bit of a work in progress with constant software bugs. For example, filters in Zoho weren’t effective like they were in Zimbra. The biggest complaint internally was the search function in Zoho is horrible.
We finally decided to ‘eat from our own kitchen’ and recognized our mistake with choosing Zoho Mail.
We decided rather than going back to ‘mediocre’ Microsoft we should ‘eat our own meals’. After all, cooking at home is healthier than eating out at restaurants all the time. After buffing up our Bizmail service (Hosted Zimbra Collaboration servers), our internal team moved with our domain back to Zimbra Bizmail. The best move we could have made. Now our team can
- Do everything from the browser from any computer (Mac, Windows, LINUX)
- Sync With Outlook if that’s what they’re used to
- Use native calendaring , email, contacts, and task lists on iPhone, Android smartphones and tablets.
- Implement two factor authentication (2FA, MFA) for additional security
- Easily share whatever we need to , within the team (such as group mails, contact lists, and projects) or even with outsiders.
- Use a platform with 100M+ users and software development bringing us new useful features each year.
We probably should have never bothered with Microsoft Office 365 or Zoho Mail. However, now from our experience, we can whole-heartedly say we use the best email service on planet earth. Why? Nothing beats Zimbra . In addition, we have a team of the world’s best team maintaining Bizmail and diligently keeping our data (and your data!) secure again from the constant attacks from the bad people on the internet.
We’ve come full circle, literally. Now Bizmail is a part of CIRCLE Cloud Communications! You can check us out here. if you’re tired of compromising your data or support with big tech firms. It’s only 5,997 JPY or $59.97 per user per year. We’ll be promoting it more on our new website, after all there is nothing better than ‘good home cooking’!
Thanks for letting us share our email experience with you! If you’re looking to get out of the ‘gulag’ with big tech, now you can know you have options.
Also check out our experience, ‘How secure is Protonmai’ article here.