[Warning. This post gets a bit technical.]
I had a conversation today with a colleague (let’s call him John) about various online email providers and the services that they offer around that. He told me that his wife uses Hotmail for her email because she likes Windows Live for Windows Mobile – the client that can be installed on Windows phones to enable push email and email sync with Hotmail.
John however prefers to use Google Apps (which incorporates Gmail) because it enables him to use his own email domain (e.g. john@johnsdomain.com) rather than a Google-provided address like john12345@gmail.com.
He had one complaint about Google Apps though – there was no mobile client as good as Windows Live for Windows Mobile. However, the fact that he can use his own domain (johnsdomain.com) keeps him on Google Apps.
That’s when I mentioned a service that my wife and I (and others) have been using for a couple of years now, Windows Live Admin Center
Its a competitor to Google Apps because it allows you to use your domain (mine is jamie-thomson.net) in conjunction with Hotmail which also means you get to use the goodness of Windows Live for Windows Mobile, Outlook (via Outlook Connector) and Windows Live Mail for email plus the plethora of other Windows Live products and services. All for free.
John was pretty taken aback at this. He didn’t know that Windows Live Admin Center existed and upon taking a brief look he seemed very interested in migrating off of Google Apps. He’s going to take a closer look and then make a decision.
What I found most interesting though is that John asked the same question that I’ve been asking for the past couple of years, “Why don’t Microsoft talk about Admin Center?”. It really is a fantastic service (and recently got improved – more on that in a later blog post) but nobody out there knows about it and meanwhile Google Apps is hoovering up customers while Microsoft do nothing about it. It doesn’t make any sense to me.
