What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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@scottalanmiller said:
I just looked up Postini and here in the US they are already gone.
If you purchased Postini services though a partner, many of those are still running on Postini and not Google Apps. All users that were purchased direct via the Postini website have been migrated to Google Apps. I have 2 clients that have been converted and one not. The one not was purchased through a partner. Google has really delivered a shit product from the end user point of view. There is no portal for users to manage things. They just log in to Gmail to see the spam or wait for the daily email and if you log in to Gmail and mark something not spam it goes to the Gmail inbox and is never delivered to the mail server. The users have to then forward it to themselves.
The Postini pricing was $12 per user per year in the US. When converted to Google Apps, they are letting you keep the price for now, but require you to pay monthly by credit card instead of yearly.
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We used to be a Postini partner years ago and the price, even to us, was $2. And the service was horrible. Worst ever.
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MXLogic is $2.25 / user / month still! Wow
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@scottalanmiller said:
We used to be a Postini partner years ago and the price, even to us, was $2. And the service was horrible. Worst ever.
I believe the price was changed to $1 per user per month billed yearly around the time Google bought them.
I have loved the service for the last 3+ years. Not so much anymore. -
@scottalanmiller Yep we use MXLogic for inbound/outbound filtering. This is just another cost to offload if we moved to O365.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Microsoft has an excellent form of "AD Integration" called DirSync that keeps you local AD in sync with Office 365 but does not bind the two together. It is loosely coupled.
Cheers. Sounds great.
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So do the majority of O365 users ditch third-party filtering solutions?
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@Carnival-Boy I would say that 99% of companies ditch their old service. It is completely duplicate and a driving factor for the switch in the first place (to collapse that cost.) By having two services you make things much more complicated (you give up one throat to choke.)
It would be like buying a new car because you like how the seats feel but not wanting to give up your old car. So you have someone drive the old car towing your new car while you ride in the new one to feel like you have new seats. It’s still the old car doing the driving, just now you get the look and feel of the new one.
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@Nara said:
@Dashrender said:
Do you have a break down that you've done for another SMB that you can share (no names of course).
I could do up an environment-specific one, based on requirements. What level of uptime are you looking for, how many users are there, and how much email is there? Can the existing staff handle a fault-tolerant Exchange environment?
Level of uptime 99.9%, 90 users, how much email, External 1000 per day, Internal 1000 per day. No the existing staff can not handle a fault tolerant Exchange, nor do they want one.
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For mailbagging as @scottalanmiller puts it, we use Appriver, but only on the inbound. This does leave us at some risk on the outbound side.
Correct me if I'm wrong, blacklisting only affects your ability to send email out, not on your ability to receive email?
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@Dashrender said:
For mailbagging as @scottalanmiller puts it, we use Appriver, but only on the inbound. This does leave us at some risk on the outbound side.
Correct me if I'm wrong, blacklisting only affects your ability to send email out, not on your ability to receive email?
Correct. But that can still be pretty major when you can't respond to people.
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That's true. Fortunately email is a very small part of our business, and from the outside perspective it's nearly nonexistent.
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@Dashrender said:
That's true. Fortunately email is a very small part of our business, and from the outside perspective it's nearly nonexistent.
If you are in the rare position of email being non-critical you can be a lot more flexible. Pretty rare these days but it does exists.
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Email we can live without, our EMR, NO way!
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@Dashrender said:
@Nara said:
@Dashrender said:
Do you have a break down that you've done for another SMB that you can share (no names of course).
I could do up an environment-specific one, based on requirements. What level of uptime are you looking for, how many users are there, and how much email is there? Can the existing staff handle a fault-tolerant Exchange environment?
Level of uptime 99.9%, 90 users, how much email, External 1000 per day, Internal 1000 per day. No the existing staff can not handle a fault tolerant Exchange, nor do they want one.
Ok, so here's some numbers. I'm considering a basic 2-DAG member, 2-CAS setup for Exchange 2013. The prices are extremely generic, and your mileage will vary. Power's based off Georgia Power's commercial rates for 120 watts. Not included are any additional staff training hours for Exchange 2013, spam filtering, cooling, backups, support tickets, regular maintenance, or software assurance. For Exchange Online Protection for spam filtering, add $1 per user per month. Hardware is based off of guesstimated virtualized hardware resource consumption.
Item Qty Price Total
Exchange Server 4 $694.00 $2,776.00
Exchange CAL 90 $77.00 $6,930.00
Windows Server 4 $865.00 $3,460.00
Hardware Resources 1 $4,000.00 $4,000.00
Power 1 $271.21 $271.21
Planning and Setup Labor 30 $30.00 $900.00
Total $18,337.21
** 3 year term per user per month $5.66 **This is for an environment with only basic fault tolerance. If you move to a more resilient setup with full redundancy and load balancing, the price will skyrocket.
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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.
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@scottalanmiller said:
a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run,
And not how I generally see it ever ran in the SMB arena. It used to be all SBS, and now it is simply a single Exchange server in a VM.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run,
And not how I generally see it ever ran in the SMB arena. It used to be all SBS, and now it is simply a single Exchange server in a VM.
Yeah, which is so risky. But even that doesn't save that much money. The big money is in the CALs and that doesn't change. Cutting reliability saves relatively little while increasing the risk a lot.
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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.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
a minimum for how Exchange is meant to be run,
And not how I generally see it ever ran in the SMB arena. It used to be all SBS, and now it is simply a single Exchange server in a VM.
Yeah, which is so risky. But even that doesn't save that much money. The big money is in the CALs and that doesn't change. Cutting reliability saves relatively little while increasing the risk a lot.
How so? @dashrender asked for 99.9% uptime. Even when I ran single box mail servers, I easily beat that level of uptime. At typical 100 user SMB running my preferred setup of 2 virtualised servers with local storage can expect even better uptime, I see no justification for DAGs here. Indeed, I don't think Microsoft even supported virtualised DAGs until recently, did they?
The elephant in the room here is that O365 isn't that reliable. One quarter last year they got 99.94% uptime which is very mediocre, and that's not including what they term "service degradation". It amuses me that many SMBs are willing to spend thousands on a SAN in the (mistaken) belief that they require 100% uptime and yet are happy to migrate to O365 which doesn't offer anywhere near that level of reliability.
In a virtualised environment, your Exchange costs will fall. One Exchange server, less power, and lower Windows Server licencing costs. I see loads of great reasons to migrate to O365, but saving money just isn't one of them.
