Exchange Online vs. Exchange Server

zen master

Is anyone in here using Exchange Online? How does it compare to having a physical exchange server on premises, or the other hosted email solutions?

rsutton

I have clients using both hosted Exchange and on-premise Exchange. Here are the pros/cons that come to mind:

Hosted pros
-Most cloud providers have HA configured so you have less risk of downtime
-Less management overhead
-Likely going to be cheaper if you have a small number of users
-Support is included in most hosted provider meetings

Hosted cons
-Less control over Exchange
-Difficulty/inability to integrate certain applications with Exchange
-Can be more expensive than an on-premise server depending on the number of users
-HA can be expensive to implement so you may have more risk of downtime

zen master

Can you expand on your last point?

"HA can be expensive to implement so you may have more risk of downtime"

I'm a bit confused.

rsutton

HA = High Availability. If you have a single on-premise Exchange server and it goes down (which it eventually will) users will be unable to send/receive email. HA is a big topic but the idea is that you have multiple Exchange servers to provide redundancy in the event that one goes down.

Surge

I agree with rsutton on most of his pro/con list above.
It really depends on your needs for the user base are to determine which is a better option.
It often comes down simply to how much control you want or need to have of the server versus the cost of service for the company to do online hosting.

With that being said I work with both On-premise exchange and hosted exchange/365/etc. for large and small user bases alike. And it really comes down to proper setup / usage and having what fits that company.

Any chance you have a specific concern ?

Ssuperdoc

Exchange Online requires less administration and almost no maintenance with upgrades or patching because its taken care by the hosted company, while its easy to setup and maintain you can't explore all configuration and customization and you'd have to make use of PowerShell and sending/receiving could become a latency issue because it will add up to use of internet bandwidth.

Claymoore

Migrating companies from on-premise mail to Office 365 is about all I do anymore. The only Exchange 2013 deployments I have done are integrated with Office 365. In my opinion, if you are migrating to a new Exchange version you should just expect to go to Office 365. You had better have a very good reason for staying on-premise. The arguments I see are:

• Opposition to subscription services. Would rather pay once for hardware/licensing and be done with it.
• Tax implications of OPEX vs CAPEX when talking about subscriptions rather than purchasing hardware
• Fear of the government (or the hosting company) reading your email
• Desire to maintain control of service upgrade and client upgrade cycle

None of those are really technical arguments. The upgrade cycle is really about not wanting to be forced into keeping client OS and applications up to date - in other words, being cheap. I have had clients complain about having to upgrade from Outlook 2003 in order to connect to Office 365. We have deployments at risk now because of XP/IE8 going EOL and not being supported with 365.

It's not often voiced directly, but a big fear is someone losing their job because they no longer need someone to manage Exchange. There is plenty of Exchange and user management still required, you just get rid of the management tasks nobody likes:

• Server management. No need to deploy/manage/patch the Exchange servers
• Storage management. Everyone gets a 50Gb mailbox to start and that can increase depending on license. How much would it cost for you to purchase enough storage to provide 50 GB to all your users? Now multiply that by 3 so you can have at least 3 copies between DAG members for service and site HA.
• Backup management. Disk, tape, offsite - no longer your problem.

High availability is actually easier with Exchange Online than it is with On-Prem. You will need to address Directory Synchronization and either Password Sync or ADFS for login in your DR plan, but not DAGs, transport, or client access.

Any application written to work with Exchange 2010 or later will be fine, really Exchange Web Services instead of WebDAV. The application impersonation role makes some integrations easier because you don't have to grant a service account rights to each mailbox individually.

msteinhilber

We're looking at Office 365 presently, at the E1 tier. If we had Exchange already running onsite, say 2010, I'd be apprehensive to switch to Office 365 for one reason and I'm sure some will think it's foolish. But here it is: I absolutely despise what Microsoft has done to the look and feel of Office 2013 and OWA in Exchange 2013. They simply can't keep their damn hands off it and feel this never ending need to screw around with what was a good thing over and over for no apparent reason. Unfortunately we're running MDaemon at the moment and the decision makers will probably opt to go with Office 365. We'll get a much better feature set, but at the sacrifice of switching to a UI that makes my eyes bleed.

I'll keep my personal Exchange 2010 server running as long as I can, and many years from now when 2010 reaches EOL, I'll ditch Exchange all together and roll something else as my own little (and admittedly completely ineffective) way of telling MS to get bent.