No more hiding in the server room
Exchange in the cloud and BPOS in general - pros / cons / experiences?
Hey all - we're currently redesigning our entire Exchange org in anticipation of a 2010 upgrade. One of the very realistic options on the table is an MS cloud hosted solution. There seems to be a solid TCO savings associated with it of course but as an old school admin, I'm of course hesitant to 'hand over the keys' per se'
Has anyone had any experience thus far with BPOS / MS Cloud stuff (especially Exchange) and if so, what's been your real-world view of it?
We're of course doing an extreme level of analysis / due dligence / etc, but any input or discussion would be welcome :)
Tags: 2010, BPOS, Cloud, Exchange
Views: 192
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Carl Pickering on -
I've used hosted Exchange in the past, but never Exchange in the cloud. These days tho, companies abuse the term 'cloud' to make people think its new and exciting. Certainly the way in the UK.
The only issue I found, was the latency on the Interconnect on Outlook. Also with 2007 we had to manually add NTLM authentication to some machines to get the Outlook to work (machines being on a different domain to the domain of the machine). You need to ensure that Outlook is quite up to date too otherwise you need to start added HTTP details to the setup. AutoDiscover sorts this out in later versions, but earlier pre-2003 it didn't work.
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Permalink Reply by Vic Redondo on -
Big brother and Compliance during my upgrading. That is if your company is in one of the verticals of finance, health, etc. over all this is where we invested the most. For our BPOS we had to adapt a hybrid deployment model which added dollars and in turn restricted benefits. System migration based on size is big here too during the upgrade be careful as this may ad restrictions based on security levels and rights, but then again if you want more work you can always define user interface and privileges. Centralized resources can be a security concern too but again it is all dependent on the size of the company you are at, if you are working with small enterprise you'll have greater flexibility and less bureaucracy. Im small right now but my experience comes from large enterprises. I just needed a break from the hustle. System maintenance is easier since clients are updated which in turn allows no manual installation one computer at a time. I hoped that helped. Auto discover does help as Carl mentioned.
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Permalink Reply by Steve Goodman on -
Hiya,
We've done something similar around a year ago, evaluating a number of options including GMail, Exchange Online and On-Premises.
We ended up migrating a large number of mailboxes to the cloud, into what is now Office 365, and was Live@EDU. The remainder stayed on premises, moving to Exchange 2010.
Pros - User's who aren't critical don't need expensive storage and servers for mail. The 2010 version of Exchange Online has Remote Powershell etc which means admin is a familiar experience. You haven't lost "the keys", you just don't own the building. Office 365 also has all the federation niceness which makes the experience a lot better and allow moving to/from Exchange On Premises. Also, no patching!
Cons - If there's a major problem CIO will breath down your neck for a solution to a problem, but you won't be able to do anything, you may have to wait hours for something you could fix in minutes. If new features come in a service pack, you don't get them until many months after. Critically, your Internet connectivity now controls your SLA. No internet == no internal email, though if you've got a mobile workforce this might be a Pro!
I wrote a little more about my thoughts on the whole "Office 365" topic here, if you're interested,
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