What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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@scottalanmiller said:
One major on premise outage often does the trick. What surprises me is how often people get into a blacklisting situation and can't send mail to anyone and still don't realize that they look like they've gone out of business to their clients and it doesn't click in their minds that this would never have happened if they were on Office 365 (or Google Apps or Rackspace, etc.)
It wouldn't happen if they'd use any kind of external filtering for their e-mail. All our e-mail goes via GFI Mailmax. It costs less than $10 a year per user. Postini is even cheaper and does the same thing. I'd never contemplate sending e-mail direct.
I don't know what the risk of a complete crash and burn is. Other than some planned maintenance on a Sunday, we've had 100% uptime on our Exchange 2010 server over the last few years. It's a tough call to recommend going from 100% uptime to Office 365's 99.97% (that's around 8 hours of downtime over a 3 year period, which I think is pretty mediocre) on the grounds of reliability.
Sod's law now says my Exchange server will go down today!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Because SMBs desire these things and ask for them. Same as SBS. You can't blame a vendor for offering both a good and a bad product. If the market didn't demand the bad products they wouldn't sell. Microsoft doesn't push, recommend or require in any way that you avoid the E levels and they provide a partner ecosystem to ensure that you get good advice.
This isn't a true at all. If you look here http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/business/compare-all-office-365-for-business-plans-FX104051403.aspx you see that Microsoft are pretty explicit in what they recommend for small and mid-size business. For an SMB to go with an E plan, they would have to disregard everything Microsoft's website is telling them.
Consider the name. E is for Enterprise. If they were expecting SMBs to use this product, they should have called it something else.
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@scottalanmiller said:
SMBs don't do good financial analysis and often don't see where there money is going.
That's a sweeping statement. I think I do pretty well on the financial analysis. It's not easy because our IT infrastructure contains a lot of fixed costs and allocating those costs to onsite Exchange isn't easy. If we migrated to O365 we'd still be paying the same fixed costs to the likes of Microsoft, HP, Veeam and VMware to maintain our onsite infrastructure.
It's impossible to do a definitive comparison between onsite and hosted. There are simply too many variables. But I suspect Microsoft price everything so that there is very little difference in price either way. Onsite Exchange was, and is, such a big revenue earner for them, they're hardly going to have cannibalised their key product by significantly underpricing O365.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "ridiculously risky" (and whether you think I'm being ridiculously risky).
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You have to be ridiculously risky to make Exchange in house as cheap as Hosted Exchange.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "ridiculously risky" (and whether you think I'm being ridiculously risky).
To keep the cost below $4 total, there is no way to afford things like a mailbagging service which is typical 50% of that service alone and replicating that feature internally would cost much more than a service. Without commercial mailbagging / smart hosting you have no real protection against blacklisting, email extortion or protracted outages. It's a rare business that can afford their email to fail to a point if people thinking that they are out of business.
Then you need storage, backups and other costs which, the smaller you are, the more expensive that they are on a per user basis.
The cost of running Exchange is just too high.
And the admin's time matters. That might seem free but it is not. Every minute you put in to worrying about Exchange is a minute you aren't doing something for your business that differentiates your business. Email is a commodity and can be offloaded. Business specific support is not and cannot be. Having things like Exchange in house diminishes the value if the IT staff.
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Rightly or wrongly, I don't spend any time worrying about Exchange. I spend more time logging onto Microsoft's portal to download my subscription invoices.
If I understand the definition of mailbagging, Postini does this for like $4 per YEAR. We use GFI, which is still dirt cheap, and I'd be tempted to continue using GFI with O365, as I like it's interface and granular spam control.
Another consideration is internet connectivity. We have a 10mb line for 60 office users. I'm not sure that would be enough for O365, given the extra internal e-mails that would be going through it. We tend to use e-mail too much internally, but I have a hard time persuading users to use other options. On the other hand, connectivity would improve for remote workers who complain that their connection to our server is too slow.
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Postini was the standard at $2 or more per month last I checked but as I understand it is now discontinuing service.
It is smart hosting, mail collection, spam filtering, AV filtering combined.
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Because hosted email removes the SMTP traffic and replaces it with mailbox management traffic the traffic patterns are very different. Can be higher or lower.
External users come 100% off of the network though. Not only do each of them get a better experience but they don't impact the internal users.
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Just looked and Postini is still being advertised in the UK for 6 pounds per year, which is around $10 (not $4 - I got my exchange rates muddled). But since it's going, it doesn't really matter. I still wouldn't necessarily give up my 3rd party virus and spam filtering in favour of just using Microsoft.
Quick question: How nicely does on-site Sharepoint integrate with hosted Exchange? Would I be better off migrating to hosted Sharepoint at the same time? We only use Sharepoint Foundation.
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Hosted Sharepoint is awesome and it comes with Lync and Yammer which are really big deal. Hosted Sharepoint is enterprise edition. But it is very expensive so not likely something that would make sense unless you have a greatly expanded use case to pursue.
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I just looked up Postini and here in the US they are already gone.
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Sharepoint is an extra $4 per month and you also get Office Online, so it looks pretty cheap? It could also stop users from using Dropbox or USB sticks to take work home, so that would make the business case. It's just speed that concerns me.
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Speed is quite good. It's huge bandwidth and big servers on Microsoft's end.
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NTG runs almost completely on hosted Sharepoint.
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It's the bandwidth at our end that concerns me.
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Final question (maybe): AD integration with O365 sounds like a pain, but without that how to you easily manage user authentication? How do Outlook and Sharepoint clients login to O365?
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AD integration is a bad term. The word integration is so horribly ambiguous.
Microsoft has an excellent form of "AD Integration" called DirSync that keeps you local AD in sync with Office 365 but does not bind the two together. It is loosely coupled.
This has 99% of the advantages of the binding method that we do not recommend with a fraction of the effort and none if the risks.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I just looked up Postini and here in the US they are already gone.
If you purchased Postini services though a partner, many of those are still running on Postini and not Google Apps. All users that were purchased direct via the Postini website have been migrated to Google Apps. I have 2 clients that have been converted and one not. The one not was purchased through a partner. Google has really delivered a shit product from the end user point of view. There is no portal for users to manage things. They just log in to Gmail to see the spam or wait for the daily email and if you log in to Gmail and mark something not spam it goes to the Gmail inbox and is never delivered to the mail server. The users have to then forward it to themselves.
The Postini pricing was $12 per user per year in the US. When converted to Google Apps, they are letting you keep the price for now, but require you to pay monthly by credit card instead of yearly.
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We used to be a Postini partner years ago and the price, even to us, was $2. And the service was horrible. Worst ever.
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MXLogic is $2.25 / user / month still! Wow
