Discussion on:

Office 365 and the future of Cloud

... someone uses Office 365 for illegal purposes and the Government or whoever shuts everything off?
I know people who used Megaupload for their work and to share legitimately their very own files (reports, documentation of their projects, etc.): will they trust ANY other cloud offering?

I have been tasked with setting up 365 and its been a nightmare from start to finish. The support is non existent and the documentation is also very very frustrating and incomplete.

I would avoid 365 at all costs.

"What would be an interesting replacement would be local hardware that???s remotely administered by a cloud provider." - it's called a "bot net". BackOriface, anyone?

The biggest 'problems' I have had, have been with the ISP's and domain providers in getting the DNS records properly updated. Outside of that it has been very smooth for all the installations I have done. As a Partner and Cloud Services Reseller I have had great support. Just stay with the E series subscriptions, especially if you do not have a Partner supporting you. Being able to call for support is worth the extra few bucks in my opinion.

It seems to me this concept of a "black box" to control user accounts and act as a print server, or even an internet gateway was realized a decade ago with "server appliances". I recall setting up just such a device for a small office back in the day and thought it was a real breakthrough. No AD server, Print Server or ISA server, it was all managed through a box that had Linux and a custom configuration interface for the services and user accounts. It could even be managed remotely and cost less than $1000 at the time. I never understood why they didn't take off.

I've been trying to work out how Office 365 makes sense from a cost perspective, I don't think it does, the article says when scaled to large organizations it doesn't work, but it doesn't work in SMBs either. The argument is that it reduces IT staff, but it doesn't, because if there is only one person it just makes their job easier (supposedly, I'm not convinced) but you still need someone to do administrative tasks.

Also the $6 per user per month model is only for really small companies, even for most SMBs it would be the $24 per user per month and that is really steep, say you have a company with 100 users, the cost is $28,800 per year, and say you replace your current server every 4-5 years (as a lot of people do nowadays as they are more reliable) so $28,800 x 4.5 = $129,600. Office professional per seat you can get for around $375, so $37,500 for office for a traditional setup (and you can use it forever), that leaves you $92,100 for your backend servers (how many are we talking, two?) and Exchange, a couple of Windows server licenses, plus CALs (and you probably need the CALs for other reasons, e.g. domain controllers). That isn't going to cost $92,100 or anywhere near it. And plus, you own that infrastructure, the cost is known upfront, how much is Office 365 going to cost four years from now? What will the feature set be then?

Unless I'm missing some major advantage, doesn't make sense. Oh, plus you probably need more internet bandwidth and even if you don't you really do need a super duper reliable internet connection - if the connection goes down, you lose internal e-mail, not just external. Things they say you won't need anymore you do need (e.g. backup software) because there are very few setups that could be put completely into the cloud.

It's just a more sophisticated subscription-based model for software, doesn't make financial sense because it leaves you at the mercy of the whims of Microsoft. I think we should all avoid it wherever possible, if lots of companies start using it then you really are leaving yourself open to Microsoft abusing a monopoly.

I'll let you know after February 3rd. So far the communication on migration has been very poor and very one directional.

"SBS was generally worry free, save for the bimonthly ???ghost in the machine??? that would require a couple of days of troubleshooting, time that could have been better spent elsewhere."

Whether your "bi-monthly" couple-of-days was twice per month, or every two months, such downtime is absurd, and would be unacceptable in a mission-critical environment.

I'm with Jeff on this. Generally worry free once you get past the DNS issues. Some DNS hosters who also happened to previously host Exchange did not like losing their customers and made the experience as cumbersome as possible .. ie raise job tickets for each little DNS change - there are 2 touches here and having to touch the ticket 2x introduced an articial and unnecessary time delay. Other than that it is a joy to work with.

I don't trust this model. I want my gizmos and their code on my desk, within reach of my own little toggle-flipping fingers, thankyouverymuch.

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It's not my job to prove the earth is round - it's my job to help the Flat-Earthers find the edge.

I have migrated dozens of companies from 10 users to 200 users to Google Apps, mostly from Exchange.
No major problems so far. I believe the future (for SMBs at least) will be hosted VMs, Apps, databases, email. All you need is an internet connection with ISP failover, an awesome firewall and you're good to go.