BlkKnight

Anyone know about office 2013 (2016) vs Office 365

Our situation is this:

We have a 15 user environment with with clients on Office 2010 (although we have current SA to go to 2016 when it goes live next year).

The we have two servers running on 2008r2, one has with Exchange 2010 - these do not have SA.

Licensing wise, I need to add 5 more server CALS and 3 more Exchange CALS

I have a choice to either bin our office licenses & go with 365 (and get all the cloud & on-line benefits) or pay to upgrade our server / exchange licenses. No need to pay for office suite as we have SA.

A couple of questions with 365:
- I assume outlook users use a local OST archive? Is there a size limit, some users have 60gb mailstore. . .
- Can the users "documents" be synced to a local server where I can continue to back them up in case the cloud dies? (and we have an offline copy).

Thoughts! (and thanks)

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

Definitely get shifted up to O365. I'm involved in the migration of 1500-2000 mailboxes across four organisations. The cost benefits for a company your size must be huge.

A 60gb mailbox may be an issue as I believe the E3 limits are 50gb - however with an enterprise exchange online license you would get unlimited archiving storage - so this can easily be resolved.

Documents you would be storing in OneDrive for business aye? In that case, you can set it up to offline sync with desktops just the same as offline files, or a Sharepoint online library.

In that scenario, you would retain documents in an internet outage.

Same with e-mail, Outlook has got cached mode and hence local OST's as with Exchange if you choose to use them.

The big functionality loss of O365 vs On-Prem Exchange is the loss of ability for internals to e-mail each other in an internet outage... but with a 15 user environment, I really can't see that being a show stopper considering the cost benefits.

Give me a shout if you've any more questions, I could even suggest some migration/implementation partners if you require them.

BlkKnight

Just one other question - we still need to use Outlook 2010 (32 bit) on our accounts PC as 365 is not compatible with SAGE50. Can I still use Outlook client in a 365 environment?

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

Yeah Exchange Online can be accessed with a regular Outlook client, though you may need an additional sign-in assistant application.

That is coming up end of life though. Do you know what specifically does not work with Sage50? We've had a few apparent compatibility issues which didn't turn out to be accurate - they worked anyway!

I'm currently looking at a Sage200 piece of work for a seperate project, and it claims a subset of components don't work with O365 but will work with Office 2013. Office 2013 doesn't need the additional sign-in assistant - so upgrading to that rather than sticking with Outlook2010 is probably wise if you can.

hodgy0_2

Are you trying to get rid of all on premise servers I.e the file server, (as well as the exchange server) and replace it with share point online

BlkKnight

No, we need at least one server in house to run our crm system in a domain environment.

I'll probably update the OS on both servers - but am not fussed about keeping exchange in house.

stiscooby

If you don't mind me asking a question ..............

We are looking to migrate a customer onto 365 for email (will still have on premise AD/Data Servers etc). They currently have an on premise Exchange Server, are there any utilities out there to assist in importing users existing emails (currently use Outlook) from their existing Exchange mailboxes into 365?

The few utilities we have come across so far only seem to do part of the job i.e. will only import standard folders such as Inbox etc, and not any sub folders.

The main issue is their comms are not the best (only just gone to fibre at one office and standard ADSL at the other) and their existing Exchange database is around 170Gb so trying to find if there is a way where you can kick off some kind of import which can keep running in the background then once 'up to date' we can switch them over without too much hassle?

Thanks

Fonzey

iTrader: (5)

Dell Software (previously Quest) have got a pretty good tool that I've used which uses an admin credential set from your On-Prem exchange and a tenant admin from your O365 subscription to replicate all mailboxes over.

You can do it weeks ahead of your migration to do the initial sync, then just do a delta sync on flip-over date.

Alternatively, if you're on at least Exchange 2010 SP3 you can initiate an Exchange/O365 Hybrid mode which allows you to move mailboxes back and forth as if you were just moving them between mailbox databases on the same server. You'll need extra infrastructure for this though such as Directory Sync and ADFS - but they're both must-haves for a hybrid environment anyway.

DirSync/ADFS allows your users to login to Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online, Lync, etc using their on-prem AD credentials. It's transparent to the users.

Littleted

Or just pst em all LOL

Where doing 79000 as we speak, considering I've been on **** notes for 6 years I hated it. Outlook is solo,I have fun..

Skype for business comes soon, the clients upgarded already the back ends happen soonish...

For,the 60gig mailbox give em a kick and get them to tidy it, and as fonzy says use the unlimited archive...

Use o365 on prem is so old school unless your defence, works a treat

bludgod

iTrader: (3)

for the 60gb mailbox you could export mails older than a specific date to a PST file, also just to confirm you can 100% use regular outlook with office365 and I didn't need the sign in app to do it.

hodgy0_2

the problem is not really a technical one, rather a user one

some users are quite happy with a local .pst export - they then use it as a reason/excuse to clean up the inbox etc -- and make a fresh start

then you have the OCD t0ssers who want it EXACTLY as it was before - nothing must change, because that is the way they have always worked and they simply can't change - they are just too fvcking important (read th1ck)

these guys are the reason IT projects balloon in cost