I get asked about Microsoft 365 a lot. Usually by small business owners who are still running email through their web hosting company, or using a free Gmail address with their business name nowhere in sight. The question is always the same: "Is it worth switching?" The short answer is yes, almost always. Here's the longer answer.

Moving your business email to Microsoft 365 gives you professional addresses at your own domain, shared calendars, cloud storage with OneDrive, and access to tools like Teams and the full Office suite. For most small businesses, it is the single biggest improvement you can make to how your team works day to day.

Why Businesses Make the Move

The biggest reason is professionalism. Sending quotes and invoices from a yourname@gmail.com address does not inspire confidence. Having yourname@yourbusiness.co.uk does. But it goes well beyond that.

With Microsoft 365, every user gets:

  • A proper Exchange mailbox with 50GB of storage
  • Shared calendars so you can see when colleagues are free
  • 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage per user, accessible from any device
  • Microsoft Teams for chat, video calls, and file sharing
  • The full Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) on the Standard plan

I see a lot of businesses across Uckfield and East Sussex still running on the email their web host bundled in with their website. Those mailboxes are usually tiny, have no calendar sync, no shared contacts, and no mobile push email. Microsoft 365 is a different world.

What the Migration Actually Involves

This is where people's eyes glaze over, so I will keep it practical. Moving to Microsoft 365 involves three main steps:

1. Setting up your domain in Microsoft 365. You verify that you own your domain by adding a DNS record. This does not affect your existing email at this stage.

2. Migrating existing mailboxes. Your old emails, contacts, and calendar entries get copied across to the new Microsoft 365 mailboxes. Depending on how much data there is, this can take anywhere from an hour to overnight.

3. Switching your DNS records. This is the point of no return. Your domain's MX records get pointed to Microsoft, which tells the internet to deliver new mail to your Microsoft 365 mailboxes instead of the old ones. This change can take up to 48 hours to fully propagate, though it is usually much quicker.

After that, every device needs reconfiguring: Outlook on desktops, mail apps on phones and tablets, any shared mailboxes or aliases. This is the part that takes the most hands-on time.

Common Pitfalls I See

Having done plenty of these migrations for businesses locally, here are the things that catch people out:

  • Not backing up old emails first. If you are on a POP3 setup and your emails only exist on your computer, you need to back those up before touching anything. If that machine dies or something goes wrong mid-migration, those emails are gone forever.
  • DNS propagation delays. After switching MX records, there is a window where some emails go to the old server and some go to the new one. I always keep the old mailbox active for at least a week to catch stragglers.
  • Outlook profile issues. Outlook can be stubborn about old profiles. Sometimes you need to create a fresh Outlook profile rather than trying to reconfigure the existing one. It takes two minutes but saves a lot of headaches.
  • Shared mailbox confusion. A shared mailbox (like info@ or accounts@) does not need its own licence in Microsoft 365, which is good. But it does need setting up properly, and permissions need assigning to the right people. I have seen businesses pay for extra licences they did not need because they did not realise shared mailboxes are free.
  • Forgetting about other services. If your domain also sends email from a website contact form, a CRM, or an invoicing system, those need updating too. Otherwise their emails will start failing SPF checks and landing in spam.

What Does It Cost?

Microsoft 365 is a per-user monthly subscription. The two plans most small businesses choose between are:

  • Business Basic — around £4.50 per user per month. You get Exchange email, OneDrive, Teams, and the web versions of Office apps. Good if your team is happy working in a browser.
  • Business Standard — around £9.40 per user per month. Same as Basic, plus the full desktop Office apps (Word, Excel, Outlook, etc.). This is what most businesses go for.

For a team of five on Business Standard, you are looking at roughly £47 per month. That includes email, cloud storage, Office apps, and Teams. Compared to buying Office licences outright and paying separately for email hosting, it is usually cheaper overall and far easier to manage.

Worth knowing: If you are currently paying for email through your web host (typically £1-3 per mailbox per month), factor in that you can cancel those when you move to Microsoft 365. The net cost increase is often less than people expect.

What You Lose If You Go Cheap

I occasionally get asked to set up "just email" using the cheapest option possible. There are a few ways to do email on the cheap, and they all have trade-offs.

POP3 email from your web host is the most common budget option. It works, technically, but POP3 downloads emails to one device and typically deletes them from the server. That means your phone and your laptop will show different emails. There is no calendar sync, no shared contacts, and storage limits are usually tiny.

Free email services (Gmail, Outlook.com) are fine for personal use, but using a free address for business looks unprofessional and you have no control over it. If Google decides to lock your account, your business email is gone.

The difference with Microsoft 365 (or any proper Exchange-based email) is that everything syncs everywhere. Read an email on your phone, it shows as read on your laptop. Add a calendar event on your desktop, it appears on your phone. That sounds basic, but if you have been living without it, the difference is night and day.

What About Google Workspace?

I would not be giving you the full picture without mentioning Google Workspace. It is Microsoft 365's main competitor, and it is a perfectly good platform.

Google Workspace starts at around £5.50 per user per month for the Business Starter plan. You get Gmail with your own domain, Google Drive, Google Meet, and the Google Docs suite.

The honest comparison: if your team already lives in Google (Chrome, Android phones, Google Drive), Workspace can be a natural fit. But for most small businesses I work with across East Sussex, people are more comfortable with Outlook and Word than they are with Gmail and Google Docs. Staff know how to use Office. Retraining everyone on a different set of apps is a hidden cost that does not show up on the invoice.

Microsoft 365 also integrates better with most business software, accounting packages, and CRM systems. If you are not sure which way to go, I am happy to talk it through with you.

How Long Does It Take?

For a typical small business with up to about ten users, I allow one to two days. The actual mailbox migration can run in the background or overnight, so the main downtime is during the DNS switchover and device reconfiguration.

Most users are up and running on the new system within a few hours. The tail end is usually catching the odd device that was not online during the switchover, or sorting out a shared mailbox that needs tweaking.

I always do these migrations on a weekday so I can monitor the DNS changeover in real time and deal with anything that comes up. Doing it on a Friday afternoon and hoping for the best over the weekend is a recipe for Monday morning chaos.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to move business email to Microsoft 365?

For a typical small business with up to ten users, the whole process takes one to two days. The actual mailbox migration can run overnight, and most of the time is spent reconfiguring devices and making sure everything works properly afterwards.

Will I lose any emails when migrating to Microsoft 365?

Not if it is done properly. A full backup of existing mailboxes should always be taken before migration begins. The migration process copies emails across rather than moving them, so originals remain in the old system until you are satisfied everything has transferred correctly.

Is Microsoft 365 better than Google Workspace for a small business?

Both are solid platforms. Microsoft 365 is the better fit if your team already uses Outlook and Word, or if you need tight integration with desktop Office apps. Google Workspace works well for businesses that are comfortable working in a browser and prefer Google's interface. For most small businesses in my experience, Microsoft 365 is the more natural choice because staff are already familiar with it.

If you are thinking about moving your business email to Microsoft 365 and want someone to handle it properly, give me a call on 01825 768548 or send me a message. I cover Uckfield, Lewes, Crowborough, Haywards Heath and the wider East Sussex area. If you want ongoing IT support as well as the migration, have a look at our GNL Protect managed plans — they include email setup, monitoring, and support so you are not on your own once the move is done.