Exchange server Implemenetation Analysis
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I know I'm late to the party.
I don't think I've ever had a complete Office 365 outage. I've had occasions where a few users couldn't log in or receive email.... but never an occasion where we were completely unable to access our email.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I'm on the O365 Plans & Pricing page. They definitely do not provide a link to Hosted Exchange anywhere. So odd, this was the plan that built their service.
I think that a lot of it is probably that Hosted Exchange is effectively a loss leader and not where they are making any money.
This was my whole point - effectively Hosted Exchange costs $5/user/month, even though they do offer another plan - it's not easily accessible by the masses because the masses will search for O365, not Hosted Exchange.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I'll give you that - a straight up apples to apple comparison (though I'd argue that the average SMB is not aware of the $4 version, and only aware of the $5+ version because MS has the email only option pretty well buried).
That this price is buried is brand new. New enough that I would be surprised how many people know that it is missing. The $4 price was so prominent for the first four years or whatever of Office 365 that I assume that Microsoft just assumes that everyone knows to look for Hosted Exchange and it will pop up. It's talked about in the SMB so often (larger businesses probably don't consider the pure email option very often) that maybe they feel that pushing it will hurt their other stuff? I know that it is listed as the price on SW regularly.
The $4/month/user price is how I originally convinced my management to get into Office 365... it wasn't until we had been on email for a year that I convinced them to do the Office 365 subscription for Office as well.
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@Dashrender said:
I assume by lost opportunity you mean the inability to use the cash you spend on locally hosted exchange that could have been spent on other opportunities that might arise?
That's one aspect. There are many, some examples:
- The time spent managing the on premises and the time learning Exchange could be used to do other things in IT.
- The move from Capex to Opex has value (dollar for dollar, of course.)
- Corners will inevitably be cut. Very commonly taking infrequent backups, not testing backups, not giving 50GB of storage to each mailbox user - which sounds trivial but typically results in lots of lost IT and business time in unnecessary email management, HR discussions, etc. SMBs spend a lot of time and effort, typically, trying to reign in a cost that effectively does not exist if they were not running on premises. That cost, either in providing that amount of storage and/or in dealing with curtailing email storage usage is very real but hard to measure.
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@Dashrender said:
This was my whole point - effectively Hosted Exchange costs $5/user/month, even though they do offer another plan - it's not easily accessible by the masses because the masses will search for O365, not Hosted Exchange.
That's not how the price comparison works. Hosted Exchange is $4, it's not very buried, every MS Partner (the recommended way to deal with O365) is quite aware as are every community discussing it. It's listed all over the place. Google takes you right there, if you are looking for Exchange you would almost always go there first (Google, that is.) The way that normal people look for information they would never even know that it was "buried." If people are seeking Office 365 and not Exchange, chance are they aren't looking for Exchange anyway.
Using $5 because it isn't prominently displayed is not a good way to do cost comparisons. The price is $4, it just is. If you are going by "prices commonly known by average people" all kinds of things break down. In IT we need to work with the real prices and the prices we can get, not the prices "as understood by average people."
Average people don't work in IT, don't implement Exchange, can't implement Exchange safely or cost effectively, don't need business email, etc. The prices to them really do not apply. Just because it takes a little effort to look up a price doesn't mean that we should use a different price when doing evaluations of value.
Once you go down the path of "assumed" pricing you can wind up with anything. For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!) so do you include the price of a SAN in the cost of an on-premises Exchange deployment? Of course not, nor do you use the prices of a different O365 plan.
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@coliver said:
I know I'm late to the party.
I don't think I've ever had a complete Office 365 outage. I've had occasions where a few users couldn't log in or receive email.... but never an occasion where we were completely unable to access our email.
Same here, it always seems to be very isolated.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Exactly. I only give remote access to those that require it. It's a fairly crude and trivial layer of security, but all the same I have some fears about giving all staff remote access to our data.
Remote access to data and remote access to their individual email accounts is a little different, though. Granted, their email is your data, no question there, just that it is data that they already have complete access to and manage themselves. It's not like more general data.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I think it is less than that they are tinkering and more than their infrastructure is more complex. You probably only have one or two email servers. Places where I have been have hundreds of them. They constantly need to have hardware maintenance, patches applies, clustering managed, capacity planning done, etc. And they are attacked much more often. Once you add clustering, especially on a big scale, you get lots and lots of issues. But it is pretty hard to avoid in a massive environment, even if only for handling the capacity.
Yep, our whole system is complex so it can have issues easily. But, we have many people who can work on any issues quickly. We get many attempted attacks from China daily as well, sometimes hourly or worse.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I think it is less than that they are tinkering and more than their infrastructure is more complex. You probably only have one or two email servers. Places where I have been have hundreds of them. They constantly need to have hardware maintenance, patches applies, clustering managed, capacity planning done, etc. And they are attacked much more often. Once you add clustering, especially on a big scale, you get lots and lots of issues. But it is pretty hard to avoid in a massive environment, even if only for handling the capacity.
Yep, our whole system is complex so it can have issues easily. But, we have many people who can work on any issues quickly. We get many attempted attacks from China daily as well, sometimes hourly or worse.
Which, in turn, leads to more, smaller issues but less often to complete fires including the loss of the entire environment.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Exactly. I only give remote access to those that require it. It's a fairly crude and trivial layer of security, but all the same I have some fears about giving all staff remote access to our data.
Remote access to data and remote access to their individual email accounts is a little different, though. Granted, their email is your data, no question there, just that it is data that they already have complete access to and manage themselves. It's not like more general data.
They could just as easily email to their personal emails.
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@scottalanmiller said:
For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!)
They do?
I'll be polling my friends.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!)
They do?
I'll be polling my friends.
If I remember right MS also recommends RAID 5. /sarcasm
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Exactly. I only give remote access to those that require it. It's a fairly crude and trivial layer of security, but all the same I have some fears about giving all staff remote access to our data.
Remote access to data and remote access to their individual email accounts is a little different, though. Granted, their email is your data, no question there, just that it is data that they already have complete access to and manage themselves. It's not like more general data.
I do the same thing but for entirely different reasons. We limit access to avoid exposing ourselves to outside of normal hour work issues. 80%+ of our staff are hourly employees, sure some of them would like remote access to their email but we don't allow it to prevent the possibility that they will come back and say we owe them pay for checking their email outside of work hours.
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@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!)
They do?
I'll be polling my friends.
If I remember right MS also recommends RAID 5. /sarcasm
I thought I heard that was changed.
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@Dashrender said:
@coliver said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
For example, even the average IT pro thinks that Exchange requires a SAN (not even recommended by MS!!)
They do?
I'll be polling my friends.
If I remember right MS also recommends RAID 5. /sarcasm
I thought I heard that was changed.
Note the sarcasm. It never was the case to my recollection. They mentioned RAID 5 in a whitepaper but never as a recommended configuration.
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@Dashrender said:
I do the same thing but for entirely different reasons. We limit access to avoid exposing ourselves to outside of normal hour work issues. 80%+ of our staff are hourly employees, sure some of them would like remote access to their email but we don't allow it to prevent the possibility that they will come back and say we owe them pay for checking their email outside of work hours.
Wouldn't that be an HR request then, not you choosing to block it.. Or that should come from HR anyway.
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@Dashrender said:
I do the same thing but for entirely different reasons. We limit access to avoid exposing ourselves to outside of normal hour work issues. 80%+ of our staff are hourly employees, sure some of them would like remote access to their email but we don't allow it to prevent the possibility that they will come back and say we owe them pay for checking their email outside of work hours.
I have similar concerns. If people are off sick for a certain number of days they no longer get paid. But if people are off sick for a certain number of days but occasionally respond to e-mail.....? It seems a grey area.
It is an HR issue and having raised this issue at work, no-one else seem to give a shit, so I've decided not to concern myself with it either.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why are you looking at having Exchange in house? That should be an extremely rare thing today. There are unique cases where it still makes sense but generally that is only very large firms with extremely special needs, massive amount of Exchange expertise (that you have questions at all about it flags your firm as not really being a candidate to have it be in house) with specific regulations making it necessary.
There is just no way to run Exchange in house anywhere near as well as Microsoft runs it themselves.
@sreekumarpg discussed this with me initially on this, and the first thing came was about office 365. Unfortunately, the company's top guys are not yet convinced to move anything to the "cloud"
Which is why he has to look for all possible options to do a in house setup with few pilot users and do a feasibility study and I really hope with that test, someone will be convinced to run this with O365 is far more better than a hosted one. Their user base more than 1000 if i am not mistaken, worldwide.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
@Dashrender said:
I do the same thing but for entirely different reasons. We limit access to avoid exposing ourselves to outside of normal hour work issues. 80%+ of our staff are hourly employees, sure some of them would like remote access to their email but we don't allow it to prevent the possibility that they will come back and say we owe them pay for checking their email outside of work hours.
Wouldn't that be an HR request then, not you choosing to block it.. Or that should come from HR anyway.
Sure, if we had an HR department. HR is the Office Manager (basically our CEO in a medium sized clinic). And this request did come from her.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
I do the same thing but for entirely different reasons. We limit access to avoid exposing ourselves to outside of normal hour work issues. 80%+ of our staff are hourly employees, sure some of them would like remote access to their email but we don't allow it to prevent the possibility that they will come back and say we owe them pay for checking their email outside of work hours.
I have similar concerns. If people are off sick for a certain number of days they no longer get paid. But if people are off sick for a certain number of days but occasionally respond to e-mail.....? It seems a grey area.
It is an HR issue and having raised this issue at work, no-one else seem to give a shit, so I've decided not to concern myself with it either.
I'm not sure the differences between the US and the UK regarding these workers.
If our hourly employees are sick, they are NOT getting paid - regardless of anything else. If they have short or long term disability insurance, that could kick in and pay them, but that's between the employee and the insurance company and has little or nothing to do with our company.
Our concerns aren't around people being sick though. It's about them reading/acting upon emails when they are not scheduled to be working. In an hourly situation, typically they would have to be paid for any work (acting upon email, even if that action is just replying to an email with information) would need to be paid.
