Office 365 vs onsite (noob question)

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

R.O.S.S.I

Soldato
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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'
 
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'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.
 
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