What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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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
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@scottalanmiller said:
We used to be a Postini partner years ago and the price, even to us, was $2. And the service was horrible. Worst ever.
I believe the price was changed to $1 per user per month billed yearly around the time Google bought them.
I have loved the service for the last 3+ years. Not so much anymore. -
@scottalanmiller Yep we use MXLogic for inbound/outbound filtering. This is just another cost to offload if we moved to O365.
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@scottalanmiller said:
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.
Cheers. Sounds great.
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So do the majority of O365 users ditch third-party filtering solutions?
