Office 365 question

tmtex

Benefits ? other then costs
Cons ?

Reason I ask is that I work for a company that runs 365 with office 2010. Other then email administration whats the big deal about it?

NetworkNewb

Well... Isn't Microsoft going to stop supporting stand alone versions of Office (after the 2016 version) and Office365 will eventually be the only option in the future? So embrace it now or later?

TechGromit

What upgrade? The core function of Microsoft Office hasn't really chanced since Microsoft Word 2003. Sure they may have added a few new nifty features, moved the buttons around, slapped a new year label on the box, but for 95%+ users of word, there is no real difference. So why upgrade? Personally I still use Word 2003, if I create documents at work I plan to use at home, I save them as 2003 word documents.

bettsy584

Benefits;

You don't have to worry about managing Exchange servers, with DAG's, availability etc.

Also the same goes for SharePoint, Skype for Business...........etc etc.

MDM solution InTune which is almost baked in also removes the need for solutions like AriWatch.

All in All it's a no brainer, unless your the Exchange guy who hates cloud and wants to be unemployed in 3 years.

Chinook

Benefits:

- predictable costs for the business. You pay a monthly fee versus spending $100,000 every 3 years updating hardware.
- It's secure. It's extremely common to find on-prem Exchange that is not properly patch. One reason is some of the outages to patch last hours
- extremely unlike to fail. It's hosted by Microsoft who know their products better than you ever will.
- You get to hand off the risks (and rewards) to MS. It's one less issue to deal with & we all know how critical email is.
- You get the latest MS office package included in the deal (on most packages)

Cons:

- The monthly cost may seem high and be a hard sell to a client.
- Security concerns. "But the government might snoop on my data". My answer to that is if the government wants your data, they'll call the NSA and get it. I hear this concern all the time and it's always overblown. It's more amusing from smaller firms who are concerned about data security but their whole "security presence" is a SonicWALL with 4 year old firmware.
- In certain cases data may need to be stored onsite. I believe hospitals require that. May be the same for government.

You can actually get an MCSE in the product now.

bgold87

I agree with what most people have said, my guess is on premise Exchange will be going away, or at least will be a hybrid only server.

OctalDump

Just the general cloud benefits. You outsource a big part of managing your IT infrastructure, and make some of the 'nice' stuff like collaboration more accessible for smaller IT teams. The effort to set up private cloud to support this kind of "work from anywhere" model, where it's always available and is reasonably secured is expensive stuff. MS also make the hybrid cloud pretty easy.

Specifically for email, I think for most organisations hosting email in house is a waste of money. It's such a commodity and management scales so well, that it's generally cheaper to outsource than pay for servers, seat licenses, software, staff, spam filtering, security, archiving and compliance etc. The cost per seat is probably worth that alone.

If you look at alternatives - Google Apps for example - then the biggest selling point is that this is Office. It's very easy for any organisation using Office now to change to Office.

The downside, like any cloud, is handing over control to someone else. What do you do if want to move to another provider? Where is you data actually hosted? What are they doing with it? What guarantees do you have if it goes down? How does it work if the office internet goes down?