Has anyone moved to Office 365 completely?

How did it work for you?

We have some accounts and no trust of any kind to our domain, we just use the microsoftonline sub-domain and use Lync.

Personally I'd love the idea of getting Exchange/Sharepoint off site.

IT Director says it works out too expensive, and one of my senior colleagues is against just about anything cloud related.

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Comments

Zartanasaurus

I don't know what we pay to have our Exchange on-site, but our email guy showed me the bill for what it would cost to move Exchange "to the cloud" and it was a big number. I think our Sharepoint team is considering this move.

cnfuzzd

Was your email guy including his salary in the on-premise comparison? What about server resources dedicated to Exchange? In my last job, we had 100 mailboxes and our mail admin (me) was also our sql admin, network admin, server admin, and just-about-everything-else admin, and we were never doing all of the things we should to keep our exchange infrastructure up-to-date with current recommendations, so there was little cost savings to moving mail to the cloud. In companies where entire teams and server farms are dedicated to email, and there are frequent upgrades etc being done, it gets a lot closer.

it_consultant

Exchange in house is not that expensive, then again neither is Office 365. Honestly, most of the time EX 2010 kind of runs itself. Assuming you keep an eye on your backups and DB file growth - you are basically good with Windows updates until a new version is released. Even then, you aren't really forced from release to release to upgrade. Most of the time my Exchange tasks revolve around the occasional deleted email and something either getting caught in the spam filter that shouldn't have been, or something let through that shouldn't have been. That doesn't go away with office 365.

GAngel

I'm actually listening to RFP's for this right now. It makes sense for my organization as 2/3's of our users are in the field. I'm not sure if it will be a fiscal year 2013 change but by 2014 office or something similar will be in place.

PurpleIT

it_consultant wrote: »

Exchange in house is not that expensive, then again neither is Office 365. Honestly, most of the time EX 2010 kind of runs itself. Assuming you keep an eye on your backups and DB file growth - you are basically good with Windows updates until a new version is released. Even then, you aren't really forced from release to release to upgrade. Most of the time my Exchange tasks revolve around the occasional deleted email and something either getting caught in the spam filter that shouldn't have been, or something let through that shouldn't have been. That doesn't go away with office 365.

I haven't moved to 2010, but my experience with 2007 is the same. Given the benefits of VMs the hardware costs are negligible (maybe you need some more disk space); most of the time it is given to the little tasks you mentioned.

I have the added issue of security - I work in law enforcement and any technical issues aside, the idea of having our data out of our hands is not politically feasible.

Claymoore

it_consultant is right, the user and mail item management tasks remain while what you are really outsourcing is the server and storage management tasks and costs. But those costs can be significant to keep messaging on site if you plan on delivering 25 GB mailboxes in a highly available environment with Lync integration. It gets even more expensive if you decide to virtualize your mailbox servers and keep multiple copies of all those 25 GB mailboxes on a SAN instead of cheap local disk. Plus all those servers and all that storage must be bought up front instead of paid for as a monthly subscription. Factor in cost certainty - adding 100 employees in 18 months will cost us a known X amount of dollars instead of an unknown amount to expand our messaging environment - and the service becomes even more attractive to the spreadsheet crunching crowd.

I have helped several organizations move fully or partially to Office 365, each for their own reasons. Some choose archiving only instead of purchasing EV licenses or building out an on-prem archiving environment, some move remote office users to the cloud, others move everyone. My company has seen a sharp increase in interest over the last year and our deployments are also going up. So much so that, besides one physical Exchange upgrade, the only projects in my pipeline for the next few months are O365 pilots or migrations.

I recently took the Exchange 2013 beta exams and I came to the conclusion during my studies of the new version that MS built the Exchange server version they need to deliver Office 365 and are selling it as Exchange 2013. Having done several deployments of 2010 and O365, I can see where some the architecture choices were made to increase the scalability and reliability of the next version of O365.

jibbajabba

it_consultant wrote: »

Exchange in house is not that expensive, then again neither is Office 365. Honestly, most of the time EX 2010 kind of runs itself. Assuming you keep an eye on your backups and DB file growth - you are basically good with Windows updates until a new version is released. Even then, you aren't really forced from release to release to upgrade. Most of the time my Exchange tasks revolve around the occasional deleted email and something either getting caught in the spam filter that shouldn't have been, or something let through that shouldn't have been. That doesn't go away with office 365.

What we invested in manpower nowadays in unreal - that is with basic administration on daily basis / backup and not to mention several bugs we hit with certain rollup patches and so on.

We did a calculation and whilst Office365 had some features missing, it was, taking man hours into consideration, a lot more expensive as most of the work CAN be pinged off to Microshaft.

With yet again hours and hours of calls to Microsoft (we were one of the companies making Microsoft aware of expiring dev certificates in their rollup patches which caused them to bomb out) Office365 is yet again on the table.

it_consultant

There is definitely a business case for both ideas, and the experience I have had with Office 365 was generally positive. I would much rather a small business use Office 365 than an on prem small business server. In fact, any company that does not pay attention to, or doesn't have the mind too, watch over their IT infrastructure should use Office 365.

I take a different slant with large corporate clients. I will point out that no one buys a SAN solely for exchange and I run my EX servers virtualized in hyper-v on a SATA DP pool. Factoring all the other things on the SAN, Exchange is one of the cheapest applications (in disk cost) we run.

The last few side jobs that included an exchange integration were hyper-v deployments (just got cheaper with warm replication) which were surprisingly less expensive than the client was expecting.

demonfurbie

for our type work (we only really use word) we wont move, come to think of it we are still on 03

for the avj person google docs works quite well, if you want a little bit more you can get openoffice/libre office