If you have a small business with 1-40 people you do NOT have to pay for email. All you need to do is use Google Apps (Standard Edition) What this basically does is give you Gmail for your domain. You get Email, Calendar, Documents and Sites all for free as long as you have less then 50 users. When you compare Google Apps (Standard Edition) to Microsoft Exchange Server its a no brainier for small business. You get your email address at your domain (you@yourdomain.com) with calendars that work very similar to Exchange Server. Create Events and invite other users (from your domain) and see if they are available for your meeting, Just like Exchange Server.

I currently use Google Apps for Salmon Bay Technology.com and love it. Number 1 is the price, you can't beat free. Its easy, I could train just about anyone to manage the account creation and deletion in minutes. Think I could do that with Exchange Server.

Don't pay for email if you have 40 people or less and don't expect to add any more people to email any time soon. Setting it up is trivial and can be done in a few hours, well worth the initial cost for the long term cost savings. And its one less thing you have to worry about being broken or your server dieing and you have backups to restore it from.

What happens if you go over 50 people, well Google charges $50/user per year. Which is well worth the price in extra storage and the other features that Google offers if you take advantage of them. Google Sites is a great place to create Intarnet sites to manage shared content or do basic data collection.