What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
The question was "what would it take to get your boss to move to office 365". I'm just throwing out some reasons why my boss might be put off, and one of them is that Microsoft have a very complex product mix (compared with Google), and don't always make it easy to switch products if your circumstances change. The decision to buy Exchange for a 100 user company always used to be a no brainer. One vanilla product, and everyone bought it with very few exceptions. Office 365 takes a bit more consideration.
I understand and agree, it is unnecessarily complicated. I do, however, feel that There are more options and more complicated ones dealing with in premise. Think about SBS, all the optional components, DAG, standard v enterprise, virtualization options, CALs, volume license agreements, server licenses, etc. that you have to think about.
And when compared to O365, Exchange only has one option hosted but many on premise. It is only when adding in other options in O365 that it gets complex and on premise for Lync, Sharepoint, MS Office has a lot of extra complexity too.
I agree that it is complex. But I don't sense that it is more complex. I think that it is simpler.
What managers may sense is that it is a complexity with which they don't have a decade of experience.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't consider such things as purely superficial.
On-site Exchange came in three versions: Small Business, Standard and Enterprise.
Office 365 comes in three versions: Small Business, Midsize Business and Enterprise.Rightly or wrongly, I see a direct link between those three, and it's different to your link.
You are comparing Exchange to Office 365 as a whole. You can't. It's either just Exchange (three options) to Hosted Exchange (one option) or all of volume licensing against all of subscription licensing (Office 365.)
When talking just Exchange, the Office 365 offering is super simple. $4/user/month, no levels or feature options.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You are comparing Exchange to Office 365 as a whole.
Well blame Microsoft for that. They've bundled Office with Exchange. I could go with hosted Exchange plus Office ProPlus to replicate my old on-site setup, but Microsoft makes that senseless from a financial point of view. They drew first blood in this!
Really, why do they need to have three different plans (not to mention separate Office subscription packages)? Why not just one?
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You are comparing Exchange to Office 365 as a whole.
Well blame Microsoft for that. They've bundled Office with Exchange. I could go with hosted Exchange plus Office ProPlus to replicate my old on-site setup, but Microsoft makes that senseless from a financial point of view. They drew first blood in this!
Really, why do they need to have three different plans (not to mention separate Office subscription packages)? Why not just one?
Not sure as to why. I agree that it is dumb. I think that the non-E plans should be discontinued. There should only be E plans and a la cart.
They are different though. It is still features being added. Like Small Prem has no AD or InfoPath. Medium adds those.
Hosted services partially seem more complex because the on premise add that in other ways. Like AD or no AD is determined outside of the on premise Exchange service.
You can bundle via Volume Licensing too.
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I think that they do the levels through a false sense of simplification. They are trying to guess which features are desired by companies of different sizes.
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It's like ordering McDonald's happy meals versus going a la carte. It's cheaper to order burger and fries with a Coke even if you don't actually want a Coke. I get confused there as well and it drives me mad. Maybe I really am an idiot
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That's a good example. McD's has 20 combo meals but everything except for the toys are also available a la carte. And even with 20 combos, each comes in three sizes.
And then you can substitute a shake for the soda!
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After I hand over my money at McDonald's I'll often say "oh, can I get a donut with that as well please" and they always say "sure, no problem". Microsoft would say "Sorry, donuts aren't available with your package. You'll need to cancel your order, queue up at another till and place your order all over again. Alternatively, you can get a muffin."
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Well sort of. At mcdonalds they would still make you have another transaction. And if you buy a burger and fries a la carte and then come back and buy a drink the next day they don't give you combo pricing, they make you pay a lot more.
The barrier to switching is that the ability to switch is an extra cost.
Don't know about the UK but here it is common to get a lower rate on airline tickets that can't be changed. But if you pay more you get flexible dates. Same concept. You get a discount for opting out if the account flexibility.
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The only big limitations are that you take all members of the order as the same (no per user customization) and you don't get a free migration between the plans.
My understanding is that the later is literally a technical limitation and they are working on it but can't fix it yet.
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The paradox of choice. I'd be happier if Microsoft never released "Midsize Business" and I happily paid the extra for an Enterprise plan. But now I know the Midsize plan would save us several thousand pounds a year, I'm conflicted. Ignorance would be bliss. It feels like their marketing department has shoehorned a product in where it doesn't really fit.
Out of interest, how many 250+ user companies (the supposed target market for Enterprise plans) are using Office 365? It's a no brainer for SMBs, but for large enterprises with specialist IT teams, I can see that on-site Exchange "could" make more sense. Are you guys involved in 250+ user Office 365 rollouts? Is there a sweet spot in terms of user count where onsite becomes the best choice?
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We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
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@Minion-Queen said:
We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
I wonder how much larger the internet pipes have to become for those enterprises that move to O365?
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@Dashrender said:
@Minion-Queen said:
We are actually seeing more than more large Enterprise environments move to O365. For them it is a balance of staff hours to manage their internal needs versus cost. It is also less likely for them to be audited by Microsoft for Licensing violations etc.
I wonder how much larger the internet pipes have to become for those enterprises that move to O365?
It's complex. In many cases it is break even. I'm some you need more. In some you need less. Depends on several factor like what clients you use, to whom you send mail, where people sit, etc.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Is there a sweet spot in terms of user count where onsite becomes the best choice?
Not really a spot but.... As a company gets larger, onsite gets better. Basically if you are a single person hosted is always better. If you are a million people, onsite is almost always better. Where it crosses over depends on other factors. But smaller heads towards hosted. But even 10K+ are going hosted these days.
Collocation: do all of your people sit in one or two dense locations with the email servers local to them? That makes onsite make more sense if you have thousands of users per site.
Internal email: do you mostly email each other or outside people? The more outside, the better hosted is. If mostly internal AND mostly in the same campus then more likely onsite.
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Another factor is security. The more you need security, the more you go hosted. Even the big financials and government security agencies are starting to go that way.
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All I had to tell my boss to get him to want to change was, "you won't have to replace another exchange server, ever again!"
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That is a huge benefit. Predictable, level spending. CFOs love it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Now that is a pretty nice setup, a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run, but some of the things missing from that pricing:
- Backups. This can be a pretty expensive additional component depending on the quality of those backups.
- Ongoing support. You might not do much, but everything that you do adds up over the years. Doesn't take much to cost a lot.
- Mailbagging. Even if you get it down to $.80/mo it is a huge factor and if it is $2.35/mo it's hugemongous.
Backups for Exchange with DAG don't need brick-level. It's more about restoring the entire server in case of a rare case of database corruption that failover couldn't mitigate. Most maintenance is automated right out of the box, and almost all of the rest can be automated afterwards. There shouldn't be more than 15 hours of annual maintenance.
The thing that could jack up the price of onsite Exchange is if there's only one site. Getting a Colo set up or using hosted VMs will incur additional monthly costs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And these days, when planning for three years out, storage gets to be a big concern. Where are people storing all of the email? If it is like Office 365, people get 25GB+ per person. That adds up fast. Obviously not everyone uses all of that, but some people have so much more. Typically email usage is quite high and gets higher every year. What will storage be like in two or three years? That might be expensive to plan for to store and to back up.
Usage of retention policies tends to cut down total email storage for well-established organizations.
