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When it comes to hosted email services, Google’s Gmail service and Microsoft Exchange are at heads. Both boast an array of great features—email management, convenient collaboration tools for both desktop and mobile…But in organizational setting Exchange still seems to offer a reliability and security that Gmail has not yet lived up to.

Here we will look at why Exchange continues to thrive in the domain of email hosting for business.

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1) Ease of migration

Google, still relatively young to the world of email hosting has not yet perfected its migration process. Whereas an established and sophisticated Exchange provider offers a simple and automated migration process that will seamlessly import all your existing email setup to the new environment, Google’s Gmail service requires a more manual and labor intensive setup.

I have heard that Gmail imposes a daily bandwidth limit (which could be about 2GB). If you hit this limit, the migration process will just stop. To work around this you have to use IMAP retrieval to import the email and the migration wizard to optionally import your contacts and calendars. You then have to wait for everything to be imported then you can remove the IMAP retrieval account.

All to say, long and pretty inconvenient process.

2) Reliability

A sophisticated hosted Exchange provider can guarantee 99.999 percent uptime, which is something Gmail has had some trouble with in the past.

Recently, Google removed its Service Level Agreement clause that allowed for scheduled downtime. This made them one of the first major cloud providers to eliminate maintenance windows from their service agreement. How Gmail’s uptime will compare to Exchange still remains to be seen.

3) User Features

Finally, there are a number of great user features that are offered in Outlook that you can’t find in Gmail.

1) Exchange 2010 has productivity features which help you organize and prioritize all the communications in your inbox in a highly efficient manner. For instance, Outlook gives you the option to have to-do flags and reminders which highly surpass Gmail’s way of organizing you and your emails. While Gmail has recently added the “Important” function to mark messages, it is not yet up to par for business.

2) Gmail does not support syncing of groups and multiple contact lists. Outlook 2010 on the other hand does.You can sync your Microsoft Outlook Contacts between your desktop, laptop, mobile and even other computers.

3) You have a lot of power and control with Outlook Messages and can even send (.msg files) to other e-mails, folders, etc. Gmail items on the other hand are not files, so you don’t get the same type of item-level control for archiving.

4) Outlook 2010 help avoid email mistakes with automated guidance. This will notify you when the recipient is out of office (before the message is sent), or give you a heads up when you may be sending your email to a large distribution list.

It is quite clear that when it comes to the best email hosting solutions for business, Exchange 2010 is the way to go.