We recently migrated one of our clients to Google AppsTM for Business from in-house Microsoft® Exchange. Everything went pretty smoothly until it came to distribution lists for their email newsletters and announcements.
Here’s the issue: While Google does a great job of processing distribution lists through Google Groups, these lists cannot be managed (or accessed) via Microsoft Outlook®. My requirements were simple: give me a distribution list that I can pull up in an address book and edit it or expand it as needed. For example, if I have a list of my extended family, I’d like to be able to bring up that list in Outlook, expand it, and then delete the family members I don’t want to send to, based on my own criteria. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to maintain the list in Outlook as well, but that’s not a priority.
It’s a simple requirement, but it turns out it’s not as easy to accommodate as one would think. I did finally arrive at success, however, with Sherweb, an independent Exchange provider based in Quebec, Canada. In this post, I’ll go through the three platforms I tested and describe the problems with distribution lists that I encountered: