What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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The paradox of choice. I'd be happier if Microsoft never released "Midsize Business" and I happily paid the extra for an Enterprise plan. But now I know the Midsize plan would save us several thousand pounds a year, I'm conflicted. Ignorance would be bliss. It feels like their marketing department has shoehorned a product in where it doesn't really fit.
Out of interest, how many 250+ user companies (the supposed target market for Enterprise plans) are using Office 365? It's a no brainer for SMBs, but for large enterprises with specialist IT teams, I can see that on-site Exchange "could" make more sense. Are you guys involved in 250+ user Office 365 rollouts? Is there a sweet spot in terms of user count where onsite becomes the best choice?
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We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
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@Minion-Queen said:
We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
I wonder how much larger the internet pipes have to become for those enterprises that move to O365?
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@Dashrender said:
@Minion-Queen said:
We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
I wonder how much larger the internet pipes have to become for those enterprises that move to O365?
It's complex. In many cases it is break even. I'm some you need more. In some you need less. Depends on several factor like what clients you use, to whom you send mail, where people sit, etc.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Is there a sweet spot in terms of user count where onsite becomes the best choice?
Not really a spot but.... As a company gets larger, onsite gets better. Basically if you are a single person hosted is always better. If you are a million people, onsite is almost always better. Where it crosses over depends on other factors. But smaller heads towards hosted. But even 10K+ are going hosted these days.
Collocation: do all of your people sit in one or two dense locations with the email servers local to them? That makes onsite make more sense if you have thousands of users per site.
Internal email: do you mostly email each other or outside people? The more outside, the better hosted is. If mostly internal AND mostly in the same campus then more likely onsite.
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Another factor is security. The more you need security, the more you go hosted. Even the big financials and government security agencies are starting to go that way.
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All I had to tell my boss to get him to want to change was, "you won't have to replace another exchange server, ever again!"
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That is a huge benefit. Predictable, level spending. CFOs love it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Now that is a pretty nice setup, a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run, but some of the things missing from that pricing:
- Backups. This can be a pretty expensive additional component depending on the quality of those backups.
- Ongoing support. You might not do much, but everything that you do adds up over the years. Doesn't take much to cost a lot.
- Mailbagging. Even if you get it down to $.80/mo it is a huge factor and if it is $2.35/mo it's hugemongous.
Backups for Exchange with DAG don't need brick-level. It's more about restoring the entire server in case of a rare case of database corruption that failover couldn't mitigate. Most maintenance is automated right out of the box, and almost all of the rest can be automated afterwards. There shouldn't be more than 15 hours of annual maintenance.
The thing that could jack up the price of onsite Exchange is if there's only one site. Getting a Colo set up or using hosted VMs will incur additional monthly costs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
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.
Usage of retention policies tends to cut down total email storage for well-established organizations.
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As far as why would someone use DAG, it's a requirement if you want to hit 99% uptime without data loss. If you're down for a day due to recovering a corrupted database, you're at around 97%. From a business perspective, that's a day that workers haven't been able to get new customer orders or communicate with vendors effectively. The other option is to restore from the previous backup, but that would entail losing all email since that backup happened. There are services that can replay message transactions, but do incur additional cost, typically on a monthly basis.
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@Nara said:
Usage of retention policies tends to cut down total email storage for well-established organizations.
Most companies keep too much data. There is something to be said for forcing users to destroy old e-mail.
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I don't know how big a deal this is for us Europeans:
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/cloud-services/microsoft-earns-first-european-cloud-privacy-approval-1241792It certainly makes me feel more warm and fuzzy towards Microsoft.
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My users hate me. If you're not in administration, you only get 200 megs of email. I've had no push back from my boss on this either, as regular staff should only be using email for a few internal notices, not storing jokes, etc.
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Good stuff. Keep everyone lean and prevent them from using Exchange as their document management system. I presume you can you restrict mailbox sizes on O365?
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Yes. There are controls around retention.
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Although one of the benefits is massive size. Once you can cost effectively store communications a lot if companies find it to be very valuable.
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If people store documents in the correct place, whether that be Sharepoint, a file server, or some other document management system, then I don't see how anyone could need a 50gb mailbox?
Also, I imagine big mailboxes will also prove a nightmare should you decide to migrate away from O365 back to on-site or to another provider. How easy is it to migrate from O365 to Google Apps, for example?
Just because you can have a big mailbox, doesn't mean you should. Or do we think good mailbox management is a thing of the past - everyone should just keep everything forever?
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I'm not sure what "we" think. But businesses (not IT departments) tend to think that big is better and that IT is obsoleting itself by being a stumbling block. Even if it isn't documents people need to keep a lot of communications in large businesses.
And all hosted providers are doing 25GB or higher. Gmail changed how people think about mail and they now expect persistence.
Good email hygiene is definitely still important. But overly cumbersome email restrictions is not the answer, I don't think. You need a balance. Good practices but liberal rules. IT needs to enable work as much as possible and only be a blocker when necessary.
Now that big email storage is cheap and backups are included it need not be the concern that it used to be.
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I think that no matter what direction you go migrations are increasingly painful. Every solution aims at huge storage today.
