Moving From SBS 2008 To Hosted Exchange

R

rosco

Gawd
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We are going to be retiring a SBS 2008 box and are looking to move email to a hosted exchange environment. Any recommendations on who to go with?

How about Microsoft's hosted exchange vs Office 365. Is one better than the other if you only care about email hosting? One thing I ran into was a friend that is using hosted exchange through Microsoft. One of their computers had a virus or somehow one email account was compromised. They started getting thousands of bounceback messages for emails they never sent. Microsoft said there was nothing they could do because they were on hosted exchange not the office365 product. Wondering if anyone else had similar experiences.

Any advice for the migration process?

Also, is email archiving required for ALL businesses? I was looking at pricing and if you do the enterprise editions where they have email archiving it looks like it's $20/user/month. That really adds up compared to the $5/user/month I was basing my numbers on. That said, other than backing up SBS 2008, we don't email archive now.

I've done some searching and articles say it's required. However, most if not all I found so far are selling their solution for archiving so it's hard to trust the article.
 
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^ what he said. MigrationWiz for the win!

I'd go straight to Office365 and be done. I've worked with 4 or 5 private Hosted Exchange Providers and the experience either ends up WAY more expensive than O365 and/or continual support issues or both in 1 case. Even if you go with Office 365 there are a handful of Providers that can add an extra layer of support on top of MS's basic support to help make the experience smoother in the long term for an extra fee, of course.

That being said, I've never seen that archiving is necessary, as you DO have control over the retention policies in O365 and 50GB mailboxes for users.
 
^^ I will third this recommendation. I use BitTitan almost exclusively. They have a great product and great support.
 
How much work does MigrationWiz save vs copying old email to pst, creating new outlook profile, connect to office 365 account, import pst, copy pst email over to office 365 inbox?

Just trying to make sure I can justify the cost. This would be for around 20 mailboxes.
 
rosco said:
How much work does MigrationWiz save vs copying old email to pst, creating new outlook profile, connect to office 365 account, import pst, copy pst email over to office 365 inbox?

Just trying to make sure I can justify the cost. This would be for around 20 mailboxes.
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It saves quite a bit of time and money for me personally. If all of the users are in the same general area, it may not be worth it for so few people. When I find it the most beneficial is with a lot of users, or if they are spread out distance, or even geographically.
 
boss6021 said:
It saves quite a bit of time and money for me personally. If all of the users are in the same general area, it may not be worth it for so few people. When I find it the most beneficial is with a lot of users, or if they are spread out distance, or even geographically.
Click to expand...

If you don't mind what is the cost range for their software?
 
MigrationWiz+DeploymentPro bundle is $13.99, the MigrationWiz alone is $11.39. I normally use the bundle since it makes it even easier/faster.
 
It's per user/mailbox. En mass, you can get it for $10ish through disti/partners.

It's more than worth it. Mainly because you can do it all remotely, i.e. sitting on the couch with a beer doing the pre-load. Once the Cutover has been made, run another pass and it'll pick up and migrate any changes since the initial run. It's the multiple pass functionality that makes the service so damn useful!
 
Nate7311 said:
It's per user/mailbox. En mass, you can get it for $10ish through disti/partners.

It's more than worth it. Mainly because you can do it all remotely, i.e. sitting on the couch with a beer doing the pre-load. Once the Cutover has been made, run another pass and it'll pick up and migrate any changes since the initial run. It's the multiple pass functionality that makes the service so damn useful!
Click to expand...

It doesn't seem like a bad price. I'll have to keep it in mind for the future.
 
OK, I think you guys talked me into MigrationWiz. :)

One additional question, how to I copy the contents from a public shared calendar over to Office 365? They use it for scheduling where several people can add/modify the calendar and others can view it. They have color coding etc setup. What would you recommend for that?
 
Migration wiz can move pub folders also.

But if its just one calendar, copy it to a users mailbox, export that to PST,

Mount PST in new outlook mailbox, and move calendar to public folders, reset permissions on it afterwards.
 
^ What k1pp3r said. Unless they have a metric ton of stuff in the public folder, It's almost just as fast to do Public Folders manually.
 
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