Town looks at upgrading to Office 365

Over the past five or six months, there have been numerous issues with the town’s email server regarding mailbox size limits, inability to send or receive emails, and mail server security settings all due to issues on the SmarterMail hosting side. They have experienced outages on their end with no reports sent to Chesapeake Bay Communications (CBC). The hosting company has been very difficult to deal with, and unresponsive when CBC personnel contact them with support questions regarding the antiquated email system.

Staff has spoken to CBC representatives and the majority of their clients have migrated to Outlook 365, which can be part of MS Office 365 or a standalone Exchange plan. The town currently has five Office 365 users with access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, and Publisher. As new computers are ordered, users are being set up with Office 365 vs. purchasing an individual software package for each computer.

Each Office 365 license enables the user to load the software on up to five devices, i.e., desktop, laptop, iPad, phone, etc. The town could upgrade to Office 365 Business Premium which would add Outlook and Skype for Business. With Outlook 365, each user would have a 50 GB mailbox vs. 50 MB with our current email provider. This increase would alleviate the issues with mailboxes filling up.

The cost for the period from January to June 2019 would be $1,599.