Office 365 vs onsite (noob question)

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

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Hi all, just wondering what people's opinions are of Office 365, compared to say the onsite versions of applications.

At the moment we are charity with 50 staff split across 3 sites (within 30 mile radius of one another).

The staff at 2 of the remote sites connect back to our head office via thin clients (RDP) and work that way and we have an on site Exchange server powering email, an on site file server for all storage and documents etc, an app server powering our internal apps and a Sharepoint server as well with a simple intranet. Everyone uses Office 2010 be it via RDP or on their Win 7 client machines.

As we're a charity we can now get Office 365 for free however I know very little about it and how it works etc.

My understanding is that we can move our email to Office 365 and have it all 'cloud based' which would make our Exchange server redundant which I see the appeal in, but i'm struggling to see what other benefits there are? How would the file storage etc work?! Could that replace our file server?

Is it worth going this route or should I just keep everything we have 'onsite'
 
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I recently migrated our internal Exchange 2003 server to Exchange Online (O365), around 30-40 mailboxes. It's decent, and if it's free I would most definitely do it.

Benefit wise, I don't have to maintain exchange :-D. I don't have to backup mailboxes or archives, monitor mailbox sizes, manage spam filters etc.

For a small company, the only real issue I've found is that it's not great at integrating into desktop Outlook. For example, you can't edit external contacts via Outlook and the addressbook search is rubbish, but owa is much improved (at least over 2003 lol).

As for your file server, what's stored on there?

Mikoyan:
Moving back to local exchange? I haven't heard of anyone doing that, what are the reasons?
 
We're going to Office 365, can't wait. All advantages as far as i can see. Also, no archiving or PST files again! Woohoooo!
 
Rossi~ said:
We're going to Office 365, can't wait. All advantages as far as i can see. Also, no archiving or PST files again! Woohoooo!
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You'll still want archiving (no .pst though thank god!), but it's very easy to set up. A simple matter of creating a few policies and then the user can choose which particular one they want for which folders (3 months, 6 month etc. archive). You still need it or mailboxes are going to get very clogged!
 
RichIbizaSport said:
You'll still want archiving (no .pst though thank god!), but it's very easy to set up. A simple matter of creating a few policies and then the user can choose which particular one they want for which folders (3 months, 6 month etc. archive). You still need it or mailboxes are going to get very clogged!
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Massive mailboxes and it'll archive itself once setup, it's unmanaged :) but after having the demo, i feel they need a different word as the "archive" is so easy/simple to access it's barely an archive.
 
Hmmm all of our users use the desktop client of Outlook. We're currently on Outlook 2010, is this a widespread problem? We're on Exchange 2010 so OWA isn't too bad really.

What happens to all our exchange distribution lists etc do they all get brought across with it along with everyones contacts/suggested contacts etc?

It is primarily the fact that I won't have to manage an Exchange server that is appealing to me at the moment.

Not sure what implications it will have for AD and SharePoint though - need to do some more research I guess.
 
I've migrated a few clients over to O365, can't say i've seen any issues with Outlook (2010 anyway). Only Mac users using 2011, where calendars seemed to be a bit hit and miss after migrating - although i suspect i fudged it somewhere :p

Certainly be interested in hearing what issues people are having with Outlook client though.
 
R.O.S.S.I said:
Hmmm all of our users use the desktop client of Outlook. We're currently on Outlook 2010, is this a widespread problem? We're on Exchange 2010 so OWA isn't too bad really.

What happens to all our exchange distribution lists etc do they all get brought across with it along with everyones contacts/suggested contacts etc?

It is primarily the fact that I won't have to manage an Exchange server that is appealing to me at the moment.

Not sure what implications it will have for AD and SharePoint though - need to do some more research I guess.
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Yes, distribution groups are all synced across. Suggested contacts I'm not sure about - I think they're stored within your desktop outlook client (/users/xxx/appdata/local/microsoft/outlook. I removed the profile from the machines to start a fresh, so I can't help there.

I had no implications with AD what so ever. But I didn't install federation services (for sso), if your federation server goes down you can't access your email - which for us was the whole idea of moving to the cloud (access even if the office burnt down).

I believe there is an option for moving sharepoint to the cloud too - I don't see why you wouldn't if it's free and your moving your email. There's definitely a tab in the control panel for it.
 
I'm going to do some digging and see what would actually be of benefit to us as I really don't know enough about it at the moment and how it works and how it would best fit for us.

From the outset it seems like hosted mail is a no brainer really, just don't want there to be any down time and preferably have the migration goes as smooth as possible.

I assume federated services is required for it to use the AD accounts username/pass? e.g. How do you log into OWA if its not tied to your AD anymore?
The thought of giving our users an extra password to remember gives me shivers! I get enough complaints as it is!

The same for Sharepoint too I guess. How would it all work with our domain? Sharepoint authenticates with domain accounts when you access it up so not sure how this will change if its Office 365 Sharepoint.
 
Mikoyan said:
Our company uses Office 365, but making move back to a local exchange via data centre.

Personally think Office 365 is an excellent product and reduces the need to always maintain a local exchange and blame in on MS if something goes wrong :p. After all email is king!
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So you were on local exchange, went to office 365, say it's excellent but now moving back to local exchange?

wut?
 
DiscoDave said:
So you were on local exchange, went to office 365, say it's excellent but now moving back to local exchange?

wut?
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It has it's draw backs (i.e integration with 3rd party tools/programs as well as being non-managed solution, very rare but definitely annoying outages), if you company without IT department and with small number of users, then it would make sense to utilize Office 365, but if you got infrastructure and people to look after it keep it in-house.

On the side note, I don't like where MS goes with this subscription/rental based business model, this is first step, I personally see potential problems with MS getting too greedy and pushing more and more offers like this, so I wouldn't encourage them giving business via subscriptions and rentals.
 
RichIbizaSport said:
I recently migrated our internal Exchange 2003 server to Exchange Online (O365), around 30-40 mailboxes. It's decent, and if it's free I would most definitely do it.

Benefit wise, I don't have to maintain exchange :-D. I don't have to backup mailboxes or archives, monitor mailbox sizes, manage spam filters etc.

For a small company, the only real issue I've found is that it's not great at integrating into desktop Outlook. For example, you can't edit external contacts via Outlook and the addressbook search is rubbish, but owa is much improved (at least over 2003 lol).

As for your file server, what's stored on there?

Mikoyan:
Moving back to local exchange? I haven't heard of anyone doing that, what are the reasons?
Click to expand...

Work in a company gobbled by bigger firm who were primarily Notes users :eek:

They want to unify everyone to one mail exchange via a datacentre, sorry not local as such but an exchange environment via datacentre.

The new improvements undergoing for Office 365 is excellent. Will miss it :(
 
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