What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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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.
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@Dashrender said:
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.
Holy crap! I've only been with the company since November, delete anything not worth retaining, and am at 695MB. Mailboxes that small encourage users to make a legion of PST files.
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@scottalanmiller said:
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.
We = the collective awesomeness of Mango Lassi!
Like a lot of SMBs, we don't have an IT department, so I guess I'm reasonably well aligned with the needs and wants of "the business". We're trying to implement a "lean" culture into the organisation, so definitely think smaller is better, and sometimes we'll use IT limitations (either real or contrived) as a means of forcing through changes on those users who are less keen on working under a changing environment. That's not an ideal strategy, but it can work. I'm not saying that mailbox size matters that much either way, but I'd be interested to hear about the working practices of anyone who gets anywhere near a 50GB mailbox. My biggest bugbear is probably when someone sends an Excel spreadsheet as an attachment to 20 different users, instead of just linking to it - things can quickly get out of control. Email can be the enemy of collaboration.
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Yeah. I agree with @alexntg at 200MB you pretty much force bad things to happen. When I was with a major bank we would receive over 100MB ever eighteen hours. That's extreme but still.
No matter how we want email to be treated, most users have to interact with other users who don't work that way. And their mailboxes fill up fast and they are probably required to retain some things. Bosses tend to expect you to maintain communications threads with people.
I can't imagine trying to work within only a few hundred megabytes of email storage.
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@Minion-Queen what would it take? For one client it was an exchange outage that took mail down for 4 days. Loss in income was substantial. The board then asked some tough questions - and now that client is an O365 client. The costs that would have been spent upgrading Exchange were such that O365 was a no brainer.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
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.
We = the collective awesomeness of Mango Lassi!
Like a lot of SMBs, we don't have an IT department, so I guess I'm reasonably well aligned with the needs and wants of "the business". We're trying to implement a "lean" culture into the organisation, so definitely think smaller is better, and sometimes we'll use IT limitations (either real or contrived) as a means of forcing through changes on those users who are less keen on working under a changing environment. That's not an ideal strategy, but it can work. I'm not saying that mailbox size matters that much either way, but I'd be interested to hear about the working practices of anyone who gets anywhere near a 50GB mailbox. My biggest bugbear is probably when someone sends an Excel spreadsheet as an attachment to 20 different users, instead of just linking to it - things can quickly get out of control. Email can be the enemy of collaboration.
It is 25GB typically. And rarely do people approach it. But it provides comfort.
The Excel file to twenty recipients issue is mostly handled these days through database linking internally in current Exchange and file system dedupe outside of it. It isn't the issue it used to be.
We've found that using Sharepoint via Office 365 is what stopped it for us. You do all the file sharing from there or from inside of the document and it fixes that particular email issue.
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There are plenty of users that get clogged up with their email. They're the ones with thousands of things in their inbox and a fair chunk of them are unread. Offer them help by being there to teach them how to manage email, and if they take you up on it, even later on, it's a win. If they don't, they'll just drown in email, miss important things, and have their careers suffer because of it.
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@Nara said:
There are plenty of users that get clogged up with their email. They're the ones with thousands of things in their inbox and a fair chunk of them are unread. Offer them help by being there to teach them how to manage email, and if they take you up on it, even later on, it's a win. If they don't, they'll just drown in email, miss important things, and have their careers suffer because of it.
Or they are the owner/vp of a SMB.
