Microsoft Exchange Online/Office 365

[UncleDavid218]

All,

I currently support a Server 2008/Exchange 2007 box with about 65 mailboxes. Things have been stable but a server upgrade will be in the near future (~1 year) simply due to the age of the hardware (this is in an Intel MFSYS25 all-in-one chassis).

Rather than spend the money on a new beefy box with all of the licensing costs, it has occurred to me that perhaps looking at either Exchange Online or a hosted Exchange product might be a better solution. We plan to grow significantly (up to 300 employees but only ~150 using email) and it would seem those options are more scalable. Moreover, for $4 a mailbox with Exchange Online, it's damn cheap. I know that hosted Exchange products tend to cost more. I'd like to get to having a DC/file/print box and a SQL box here and that's it. And some VM's for backups, and other misc. things.

I know that in the long run it might be more expensive, but factoring in costs for backups and other indirect things it doesn't seem like a huge cost difference.

I'm aware that the only way to get real admin-level control is via Powershell and I'm find with that. Rarely do I do things on the server outside of adding and removing mailboxes. A little Powershell never hurt anybody.

My question is, for an enterprise that requires high availability and stability, is this product viable? Our users are already used to "cloud" computing as our ERP system (Infor SyteLine) is hosted in an Infor data center. We have a PepLink Balance router which supports 2 WAN connections so we are good from a connectivity standpoint (eventually I'll add a second for "true" HA).

Also, how does the implementation work? How do I transfer mailboxes to MS for used on our "server"? Any other quirks I should be aware of?

 

[bigdogchris]

We use that product and it's pretty solid. It's nice leaving all of the maintenance and work to Microsoft. I haven't set it up yet, but you're supposed to be able to synchronize with your AD as well to simplify having to create accounts and such. Otherwise create the users and assign them a license and to distribution groups. Only time we've used PS is to pull some data for Microsoft for a support ticket.

We had a 75Mb pipe which was shared amongst a few dozen buildings and it was plenty. If you're going to the website to check the email, obviously if your Internet connection is enough now then it will be enough for this product. If you want to sync with Outlook it also sets up very easy through the wizard. If your working in cached mode, the mailboxes sync slowly so it won't saturate your link. Only connectivity issues we had were some DNS issues causing the connection to randomly drop but I didn't work on that so I don't know the details.

Here are some tools that may help:

https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/

 

[shade91]

You will want ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) set up for account/password synchronizing otherwise your users will be remembering two usernames/passwords which is never fun. Email is at roughly 95% of the point where it is a commodity and should be outsourced to Google Apps or Office 365. There's no need for the age-old email admin anymore.