Is it worth changing your email platform?
First you’ll want to ask yourself whether it’s worthwhile changing your email platform, as it’s often quite a painful process – especially if you have a large number of staff to license and educate on how to use a new system. Ask yourself whether your company is going to hugely benefit from a change in email platform?
Why are you wanting to change your email platform?
Often we find clients wanting to embark on costly email platform upgrades because they were told “it’s something they should do”, or for a reason that isn’t worthy. Often people make a change because they think upgrading from system X to system Y is going to get them some features that “don’t work with system X”, however – they just need some small changes for system X to provide said feature.
Often businesses move from IMAP mailboxes to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace because they want to be better integrated. This can be true, but unless you’re a large enterprise that works on one of these platforms – often with a bit of adjustment your IMAP mailboxes will work just fine with them and integrate nicely.
We’re sometimes told “we want to move to Microsoft 365 so that we can check our email from anywhere!”, well you can do that using IMAP mailboxes or Google Workspace… or just about any email service.
There are so many other “non-reasons” we hear for changing your email platform. We recommend getting expert advice before making such a change.
Look at the costs of changing your email platform
Usually IMAP mailboxes work out to to be much more affordable than Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, especially if you have a lot of users. With these services you pay per seat / team member in terms of licensing, whereas with IMAP mailboxes you generally get more mailboxes than you could possibly need – and just get charged for the total storage space used.
Often you’ll end up hiring a team to do the migration, which can be quite costly too. Often all of this is done, for “new features” that hardly any of the company’s staff and up using. So think wisely before changing your email platform.