In many organisations, everyday work depends on personal accounts. Staff send company mail from Gmail or Yahoo, arrange meetings through phone calls, and pass documents around on WhatsApp. When someone leaves, the organisation can lose access to correspondence and files it still needs.
What organisations want instead is straightforward enough: email at their own name, a calendar colleagues can see, meetings without everybody travelling across Greater Banjul, and one place for documents.
This article sets out what that involves and how we run the work — written plainly enough that you can use it to judge any supplier’s proposal, ours included.
What you are actually buying
Set the product names aside and a business email and productivity platform provides six things:
- Email addresses at your own name — fatou@yourcompany.gm rather than a personal Gmail or Yahoo address.
- Shared addresses such as info@ or accounts@ that reach the right people rather than belonging to whoever created them.
- A calendar colleagues can see, so meetings are arranged by looking rather than by asking.
- Online meetings, with people joining from a laptop or a phone.
- File storage owned by the organisation, reachable from the office, from home and from a phone.
- Central control over who has access, so an account can be opened on someone’s first day and closed on their last.
The exact features, limits and additional charges depend on the platform and the subscription tier. Meeting software, desktop applications, recording, retention periods and the stronger security controls are not uniformly included, so establishing which package covers what you need is part of the work.
Underneath, this will be Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or Zoho — the three platforms we assess for organisations here. Which one sits under yours matters considerably less than the quality of the setup and, above all, whether the organisation rather than the supplier holds the keys to it.
These are standard, widely used platforms, and your mail, calendar and documents are held in common formats rather than a proprietary one. Changing supplier and changing platform are different tasks — the first should be straightforward, the second is a project in its own right — but both stay open to you because you hold the administrator credentials and the documentation. A system that only one company knows how to operate offers neither, and the cost of that stays invisible until the relationship ends.
Email with your organisation’s name on it
This is what most organisations want first, and the part that matters is not appearance. The mailbox belongs to the organisation, so correspondence stays accessible when the person using it moves on. A personal account cannot offer that at any price.
A common situation is not the absence of company email but a half-finished version of it: addresses that exist, on a domain the organisation cannot log in to, forwarding into the same personal accounts everyone was using before.
Calendars, meetings and documents
Three things about these are worth knowing before you buy rather than after. Calendar visibility should mean availability rather than detail: free or busy status can be shared so that a confidential meeting shows as busy without revealing who it is with. Video meetings come from the same platform rather than a separate service, but which package includes the meeting software, and whether recording is available, varies between editions. And when the connection is poor, cameras off with audio only will usually hold — worth covering in training rather than leaving staff to discover it during a meeting with a donor.
Which platform sits underneath
The short version: Microsoft 365 where work depends on desktop Word, Excel and Outlook — the documents that go to ministries and donors and have to keep their formatting. Google Workspace where you are starting fresh and work mostly in a browser. Zoho where you also want a CRM, invoicing or a helpdesk, bearing in mind that those sit in different bundles from the basic productivity subscription rather than arriving with it.
The tier needs more attention than the brand. Desktop applications, meeting recording, device management and the stronger security controls sit at different levels, and some Microsoft 365 business plans are sold in versions with and without Teams. The gap between two tiers is often exactly the thing you needed. We size that against how your organisation works.
Your domain has to be yours
Email at your own name works only for as long as you control the name. Before any migration we establish who holds the registrar account, whether the renewal is current, and whether the payment method still works. A domain registered years ago by a contractor who is no longer reachable is far easier to sort out before a migration than during one.
If your organisation does not control its domain, it does not control its email, whatever it is paying in subscriptions.
Making sure your mail arrives
Four settings in your domain affect whether your messages reach people and how easily somebody else can send mail that appears to come from you. They are usually known by their initials, and the last three are the part most often left undone:
- MX — where your incoming mail is delivered. This is the setting that moves your mail across, and the one that stops mail arriving if it is wrong.
- SPF — which systems are permitted to send using your domain. It has to account for everything that sends on your behalf, including your website and any accounting or newsletter software.
- DKIM — a signature that lets the receiving side confirm a message came from your domain and was not altered on the way.
- DMARC — what other organisations should do with mail that fails those checks, and where to send the reports.
Mail appears to work without the last three, which is why they are skipped. The risks they help reduce are specific: an invoice filtered as spam by the organisation you are billing, and messages that appear to come from your finance office. Authentication does not guarantee delivery to the inbox, and it does not make an individual message trustworthy — a payment instruction still needs confirming through another channel — but a domain with no authentication is considerably easier to abuse.
We identify every service sending on your behalf, configure authentication, and review the results before moving DMARC towards enforcement. The aim is to reject impersonation attempts without blocking legitimate mail.
Moving what you already have
What we settle before a date is fixed:
- Which mailboxes are moved, and how far back the history goes.
- Where business correspondence sits in personal accounts, an authorised process for identifying and transferring the relevant material without importing unrelated personal messages.
- What happens to the old addresses after the change, and whether continued forwarding is possible given the access and licensing it depends on.
- Where documents currently on laptops and USB drives will live, and who moves them.
- Contacts and calendars, which nobody thinks about until a meeting is missed.
We agree the changeover window after assessing account numbers, data volumes, access to the existing systems and connectivity. Where practical the final cutover takes place outside working hours, with checks completed before normal work resumes.
Accounts, and what happens when someone leaves
Set the structure up once, at the beginning. Rearranging it later means asking people to change addresses already printed on cards and given to clients.
- Individual accounts for people, and shared addresses that deliver to several.
- Shared drives owned by the organisation, not folders inside one person’s storage.
- At least two administrator accounts, held by different people and kept separate from their everyday accounts.
- A written procedure for departures, sequenced deliberately: block sign-in and revoke active sessions, confirm any preservation requirement, transfer or forward what the organisation needs, and only then remove the subscription or the account.
The order matters. Revoking sessions is what actually ends access, because a device already signed in can carry on working after a password is changed. Deleting an account can take the documents inside it as well, while a subscription still assigned to somebody who left months ago is billed every month regardless.
Security and recovery, from the first day
Moving to a hosted platform removes some risks and leaves others exactly where they were. Hardware failure and office theft stop being email problems. Deletion, stolen credentials and ordinary human error do not.
- Deleted mail and documents are recoverable only for a limited period, which varies by platform and plan.
- An account without two-step sign-in gives anyone who obtains the password everything that person could reach.
- The platform holding your data is not the same as backing it up. Where records must be kept for a fixed number of years for audit or legal reasons, that may need a separate arrangement.
- Somebody in your organisation should know how to shut an account down immediately, including outside office hours.
Two-step sign-in belongs in the rollout rather than in a later improvement plan. Included from the start it is one line in the training; introduced afterwards to a hundred people already used to a password, it becomes a project of its own.
Training is not the optional line in the quotation
The move is finished when people have stopped using the old way, not when the subscriptions are active. Two things bring that about: a date after which the old addresses are no longer monitored, and enough training that the new way is not harder than the old one.
- Train on what people do daily — sending, searching, attaching, sharing a document instead of emailing four copies.
- Cover the phone properly. A great deal of work mail here is read on a phone and nowhere else.
- Agree what stays on WhatsApp and what moves to email, so that neither ends up half-used.
- Be clear about what is available without a connection, and how mail catches up afterwards.
Offline access has to be configured and tested before an outage, and what remains available depends on the application, the device and which files were prepared in advance. Where power cuts are routine, that belongs in the setup rather than in hope.
What it costs to keep running
Per-person subscriptions are predictable, which makes them easy to budget and just as easy to let drift:
- The cost grows with headcount. Ten new staff means ten more subscriptions, every month.
- Subscriptions still assigned to people who have left are a common and quiet waste.
- Extra storage becomes necessary once mailboxes and shared drives fill.
- Prices are set in foreign currency, so the local cost moves with the exchange rate even when the published price does not.
Checking the account list against the actual staff list once a year takes about an hour and generally pays for itself. The same discipline applies to technology purchases more broadly, which we set out in our IT procurement checklist.
How we run the work
The stages are the same for a small office and for a large institution, although the scale of each differs considerably:
- Assessment — how many people need accounts, what everyone uses now, who holds the domain, and what else sends mail in your name.
- A written recommendation — platform, tier, number of accounts, and what it costs in the first year and in the years after.
- Configuration — the domain and its mail settings, accounts, shared addresses, shared drives and security.
- Migration — mail, documents, contacts and calendars, in an agreed changeover window.
- Training — sessions for staff on what they do daily, and a separate one for whoever will administer the system.
- Handover — administrator credentials in your hands, and written documentation of how everything is configured.
Afterwards you can run it yourself or keep us on for administration and support. Both are normal, and organisations move between the two as their own capacity changes. The handover does not depend on which you choose: the credentials and the documentation are yours at the end of the project whether you continue with us or not, because a setup you cannot administer without us is not a setup you own.
If you are thinking about it
If your organisation is still running on personal email with documents spread across individual laptops, or you inherited a setup that was started and never properly finished, the position is usually more recoverable than it looks from the inside.
Talk to Nexbridge about what this would involve for your organisation: how many accounts you actually need, what it would cost in the first year, and what the changeover would require.