What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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And these days, when planning for three years out, storage gets to be a big concern. Where are people storing all of the email? If it is like Office 365, people get 25GB+ per person. That adds up fast. Obviously not everyone uses all of that, but some people have so much more. Typically email usage is quite high and gets higher every year. What will storage be like in two or three years? That might be expensive to plan for to store and to back up.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run,
And not how I generally see it ever ran in the SMB arena. It used to be all SBS, and now it is simply a single Exchange server in a VM.
Yeah, which is so risky. But even that doesn't save that much money. The big money is in the CALs and that doesn't change. Cutting reliability saves relatively little while increasing the risk a lot.
How so? @dashrender asked for 99.9% uptime. Even when I ran single box mail servers, I easily beat that level of uptime. At typical 100 user SMB running my preferred setup of 2 virtualised servers with local storage can expect even better uptime, I see no justification for DAGs here. Indeed, I don't think Microsoft even supported virtualised DAGs until recently, did they?
The elephant in the room here is that O365 isn't that reliable. One quarter last year they got 99.94% uptime which is very mediocre, and that's not including what they term "service degradation". It amuses me that many SMBs are willing to spend thousands on a SAN in the (mistaken) belief that they require 100% uptime and yet are happy to migrate to O365 which doesn't offer anywhere near that level of reliability.
In a virtualised environment, your Exchange costs will fall. One Exchange server, less power, and lower Windows Server licencing costs. I see loads of great reasons to migrate to O365, but saving money just isn't one of them.
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well, you sound convinced and solidified on your decision. Good luck good sir. I, and all of my clients, are enjoying the heck out of O365.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run,
And not how I generally see it ever ran in the SMB arena. It used to be all SBS, and now it is simply a single Exchange server in a VM.
Yeah, which is so risky. But even that doesn't save that much money. The big money is in the CALs and that doesn't change. Cutting reliability saves relatively little while increasing the risk a lot.
How so? @dashrender asked for 99.9% uptime. Even when I ran single box mail servers, I easily beat that level of uptime. At typical 100 user SMB running my preferred setup of 2 virtualised servers with local storage can expect even better uptime, I see no justification for DAGs here. Indeed, I don't think Microsoft even supported virtualised DAGs until recently, did they?
The elephant in the room here is that O365 isn't that reliable. One quarter last year they got 99.94% uptime which is very mediocre, and that's not including what they term "service degradation". It amuses me that many SMBs are willing to spend thousands on a SAN in the (mistaken) belief that they require 100% uptime and yet are happy to migrate to O365 which doesn't offer anywhere near that level of reliability.
In a virtualised environment, your Exchange costs will fall. One Exchange server, less power, and lower Windows Server licencing costs. I see loads of great reasons to migrate to O365, but saving money just isn't one of them.
Well this isn't Dash's thread and so there was no context to tie this response to something that he said, it's just a general risk and cost cutting approach that rarely makes sense. Only needing 99.9% uptime is extremely rare, that's a full business day outage accepted per year. It's logical, for a business to realize that it can handle that without major disaster, but it's rare for them to be happy with that much downtime.
Depends on your definition of uptime. Office 365 never lost email reception and service degradation is something that happens pretty often but you only notice because of their announcement. I've yet to be able to figure out what is down during those or what is unavailable. Maybe it is performance degradation. They have had end users outages (their service is way up from what it was a year ago, their bad numbers are still working their way out of the stats) but never email receipt outages (the ones that make customers think you've gone out of business) and normally the connection outages are only for a few minutes. What they have not experiences, which is the really big deal, is a data loss event. So a lot of it comes down to how you measure a service outage. Running email internally the biggest fears are losing the ability to keep receiving mail without interruption and not to lose data. Keeping internal customers connected all of the time is typically tertiary and very small blips are normally unnoticed, especially if people run Outlook they might not even know. I use OWA so see every blip in the O365 service.
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@Hubtech said:
well, you sound convinced and solidified on your decision. Good luck good sir. I, and all of my clients, are enjoying the heck out of O365.
Not at all, we'll be migrating to O365 as soon as our onsite Exchange 2010 server and Office 2010 client licences are due an upgrade, probably next year. Exchange 2010 is the last on-site Exchange I will ever run. The reality is we're getting to a point where it doesn't matter what your boss thinks, Microsoft has decided they want SMBs to move to O365 and Office subscriptions, and that is what will happen. They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails). Subscription is the future, like it or not. People who claim not to like "the cloud" had just better get used to it, because that is how it is going to be. I still think O365 uptimes are mediocre, but Microsoft is new to the cloud and can only improve as its products become more mature.
The only real downside for an SMB that I see right now is internet connectivity issues. This may not be so much of an issue in the US, but here in the UK I estimate that the majority of SMBs are still running low bandwidth ADSL connections. This situation will improve, but it's taking a shockingly long time.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails).
Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.
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@JaredBusch said:
Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.
We initially went with Office H&B 2010 on OEM licences because H&B wasn't available under open licence, so it was a significant price saving. I should probably get an open licence agreement now though and get Office 2013 Standard, but I tend to only need new licences when one of our old machines dies (as the OEM Office licence dies with it). Especially as dealing with retail editions is now completely horrible. How does the price of Standard compare to H&B?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@JaredBusch said:
Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.
We initially went with Office H&B 2010 on OEM licences because H&B wasn't available under open licence, so it was a significant price saving. I should probably get an open licence agreement now though and get Office 2013 Standard, but I tend to only need new licences when one of our old machines dies (as the OEM Office licence dies with it). Especially as dealing with retail editions is now completely horrible. How does the price of Standard compare to H&B?
Nothing compares price wise to H&B. H&B is like $150 for the life of the PC (but it's like OEM, it's legally bound to one machine and can't be moved like the older licenses). A standard Open License for Office is like $300-400, but included imaging rights and KMS key management which is very convenient when you have more than about 5 or 10 computers.
Very small businesses (10 or less computers) are probably always going to steer clear of VL or O365 copies of Office because it is significantly more expensive than the Product Card versions. Assuming they keep a PC running for 7 years, they'll buy their one version for ~$150 and never upgrade again, where with VL without SA it's be at least $300/ea and with O365 It's $144/user/year (for seven years that's $1008).
As much as Scott says - if you are going the route of using MS products you need to commit to what that direction means - very small businesses like these are rarely willing to do what is recommended and will only do what is needed right now.
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The one thing we find with a lot of SMB's these days is that they need to keep their licenses current. A good portion of them need to keep up with current versions for their cloud software compatibility, so buying a product card version every 2 years gets very expensive very quickly. We now have very few customers that have not moved to O365 due to the cost of making that investment on office not to mention combining that with their email costs. Having a small business with maybe a 1 man IT shop, running an internal email server just doesn't make sense for them due to time investment and initial cost investment and upkeep.
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I completely agree that once you get a SMB to move to O365 and assuming they can't get away with just the online versions of Office, that the requirements of the cloud solution will force them to keep up. But those same customers could go with something like Rackspace email and probably get away with using Office/Outlook 2013 for the next 10 years with IMAP (as much as I want to see email protocols improve, I just don't see it happening).
This really only applies to offices that are 10 or less. Once you get over that size, the re image rights really become worthwhile, etc.
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I did around 70 installs of new HP PCs with Office 2010 OEM a while ago and found it very quick, simple, cheap and convenient. As I said earlier, I won't be doing it again, and will move to O365 for everything, but at the moment we don't have any problems running Office 2010 and Exchange 2010. How long we will be able to get away with running Office 2010, I'm really not sure. I actually prefer 2010 to 2013.
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Funny, I just found out that my other office IS using Office 365, and I was made to purchase a license of Office 2013 through MSVLSC last year.........
They bought the Midsize Business edition too. Chalk another failure to communicate up on the board.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I did around 70 installs of new HP PCs with Office 2010 OEM a while ago and found it very quick, simple, cheap and convenient. As I said earlier, I won't be doing it again, and will move to O365 for everything, but at the moment we don't have any problems running Office 2010 and Exchange 2010. How long we will be able to get away with running Office 2010, I'm really not sure. I actually prefer 2010 to 2013.
Pretty much everyone prefers 2010. 2013 is a major technology change as they try to figure out how to run in the browser.
2010 works with Office 365's Exchange and likely will for quite a long time.
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@Bill-Kindle said:
Funny, I just found out that my other office IS using Office 365, and I was made to purchase a license of Office 2013 through MSVLSC last year.........
They bought the Midsize Business edition too. Chalk another failure to communicate up on the board.
Just shows how important it is to always have IT sitting at the table for these decisions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
Funny, I just found out that my other office IS using Office 365, and I was made to purchase a license of Office 2013 through MSVLSC last year.........
They bought the Midsize Business edition too. Chalk another failure to communicate up on the board.
Just shows how important it is to always have IT sitting at the table for these decisions.
The problem is getting the invitation.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
Funny, I just found out that my other office IS using Office 365, and I was made to purchase a license of Office 2013 through MSVLSC last year.........
They bought the Midsize Business edition too. Chalk another failure to communicate up on the board.
Just shows how important it is to always have IT sitting at the table for these decisions.
It was the main IT person (same guy who had firewall problems back in October
) who forgot to tell me. -
@JaredBusch said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails).
Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.
This is a good point. I think I will start signing users up for O365 as and when I need new Office licences for them, rather than trying to soldier on with Retail licences. So I'll be using O365 purely for Office licencing, and continuing to use our on-site Exchange for e-mail.
Are there any real advantages for the average SMB in choosing the E3 plan over the "Midsize Business" plan (apart from the terrible name of the latter)?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@JaredBusch said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails).
Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.
This is a good point. I think I will start signing users up for O365 as and when I need new Office licences for them, rather than trying to soldier on with Retail licences. So I'll be using O365 purely for Office licencing, and continuing to use our on-site Exchange for e-mail.
Are there any real advantages for the average SMB in choosing the E3 plan over the "Midsize Business" plan (apart from the terrible name of the latter)?
If you're keeping onsite Exchange, why not simply sell them the Office Pro Plus only version of O365 - It's $12/user/month - might as well save that $8/user/month if you're not going to use it.
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@Dashrender said:
If you're keeping onsite Exchange, why not simply sell them the Office Pro Plus only version of O365 - It's $12/user/month - might as well save that $8/user/month if you're not going to use it.
In the UK, Pro Plus is GBP 10.10 per month and Midsize Business is GBP 9.80. So Midsize Business is actually cheaper, even though it includes loads of extra features. That seems a bit crazy? Another reason for not going with Pro Plus is I don't want any pain as and when I upgrade to hosted Exchange. I've been bitten by "changing plans" pain before.
I still find "Midsize Business" a really annoying name for a product though.
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That is definitely bizarre pricing.
