Help setting up mail and calendar - office 365 v google v something else
February 9, 2023 11:34 AM   Subscribe

Hey all I am looking for recommendations for setting up email and calendaring for my small business, i have Imap/SMTP mail and domain hosting through mediatemple, I would like to run the business al lthrough office 365 (microsoft/outlook/teams) but am unclear how to connect my office 365/outlook calendar across devices (mobile and desktop) to my Imap mail.


Question:
- is there step by step approach to keeping mail hosted with Mediatemple (for now) but either forward or similar calendar invites to office 365 so i have a synced calendar (mobile, web, desktop) for myself and and team (this may require MS exchange...)?
- or should I move my mail hosting to google/gmail and run everything through google?
- or just do it the apple way with iCal and iMail?
- or some other approach?

Would love to get suggestions - i personally love outlook (been using it for 20+ years) but will surrender to apple or google if its best approach without migrating to exchange (which i would do but the learning curve and effort seems a bit steep)?
posted by specialk420 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
You have a lot of things going on here.

Right now you have @yoursmallbiz.com hosted at Mediatemplate and you have Outlook connected to it via IMAP. To actually use Office 365 and the ever growing set of services you are going to have to deal with the fact that Office 365 contains an email service, Exchange Online.

It is quite possible for you to use Office 365 without going all in on Exchange Online. Lots of businesses are very heterogenous in their setup e.g. most of the business is on privately hosted Exchange, R&D is on Google, last year's acquisition uses some other email provider. There are ways to configure address books and mail routing to hide all this complexity and make it appear to the outside world that none of these separate decisions were made.

That would however require you to learn more about the internal workings of Exchange Online than if you just took Microsoft's defaults and let them host your email domain.

Without knowing if you have any very specialized requirements and if you want to use Teams and other O365 services, I think you should just consolidate on Office 365 for everything. For a small business where you are doing very few special things, once it is initially setup, you will probably never need to look at the Exchange administration screens. The main overall admin portals will let you create users, manage passwords and assign licenses. This last step automatically creates a mailbox for the user.

If this is too much and you want to focus on your actual business, there will be lots of small business focused IT consultants that can do on-demand piecemeal support.
posted by mmascolino at 12:00 PM on February 9, 2023


Response by poster: @mmascolino - office365 sounds like a good option, the only trick for me is legacy email in mediatemple cloud... a lot of it. Does O365, import existing mailboxes?

thanks!

-AK
posted by specialk420 at 12:40 PM on February 9, 2023


There are many different solutions to deal with existing email when onboarding your domain into O365. This would be part of the standard playbook that any O365 adoption consultant would run for you.
posted by mmascolino at 1:23 PM on February 9, 2023


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