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by altano 5238 days ago
(Disclaimer: I work for MS)

It's $5/mo (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/compare-plans.aspx). If that sounds like a lot, keep in mind that you get:

  * No ads
  * 24/7 phone support
  * Uptime SLA
  * Proper mobile support (everything supports Exchange w/ proper syncing, push email, device wipe, searching the server, etc better than IMAP)
  * Calendaring and other Exchange features
  * Great webmail (I like the latest version of OWA a lot)
  * Custom domain support
  * Etc
I want my email provider's business model to be getting dollars from me. If I didn't work for MS I perhaps would have done some more research into everything everyone else is mentioning, but I've been very happy with Office 365's email hosting and haven't needed to do any comparison shopping.
1 comments
antoncohen 5238 days ago
$6/month to match Google Apps features (Docs, Chat, Sites, anti-virus). Plus the $6/month doesn't include phone support ($5/month does). $10 adds phone support, but you lose Docs editing. They spent way too much time creating complicated pricing.

Google Apps for Business gets you all the features of P1 and E1, for $50/year ($4.17/month), or $5/month if you pay monthly. And Google Apps Free gets you most of the features at $0/month.

Also, Office 365 has silly User Agent checking, they don't support any Linux or Chrome on Mac, even though they support Firefox and Chrome on Windows and Firefox on Mac [1]. My understanding is if you change the User-Agent string it works in Linux.

Silly pricing, silly compatibility restrictions, less features at a higher cost than Google Apps. I'm not getting the appeal.

[1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/ff6525...

link