@JaredBusch said:

@Carnival-Boy said:

They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails).

Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.

This is a good point. I think I will start signing users up for O365 as and when I need new Office licences for them, rather than trying to soldier on with Retail licences. So I'll be using O365 purely for Office licencing, and continuing to use our on-site Exchange for e-mail.

Are there any real advantages for the average SMB in choosing the E3 plan over the "Midsize Business" plan (apart from the terrible name of the latter)?

I did around 70 installs of new HP PCs with Office 2010 OEM a while ago and found it very quick, simple, cheap and convenient. As I said earlier, I won't be doing it again, and will move to O365 for everything, but at the moment we don't have any problems running Office 2010 and Exchange 2010. How long we will be able to get away with running Office 2010, I'm really not sure. I actually prefer 2010 to 2013.

@JaredBusch said:

Why are you not using Open License anyway? Granted the math works out better for Office 365 unless you count never upgrading.

We initially went with Office H&B 2010 on OEM licences because H&B wasn't available under open licence, so it was a significant price saving. I should probably get an open licence agreement now though and get Office 2013 Standard, but I tend to only need new licences when one of our old machines dies (as the OEM Office licence dies with it). Especially as dealing with retail editions is now completely horrible. How does the price of Standard compare to H&B?

I've run InTune for our some of our remote workers for a few years now. We got it more or less when it was released. It has improved a lot since then, but I've generally hated it. We got it because we needed Windows Enterprise licences for DirectAccess; remote assistance; antivirus; patch management; and MDM.

I abandoned DirectAccess and use Hamachi instead. The remote assistance part of InTune is dire, and I quickly replaced it with LogMeIn. The antivirus didn't stop some of our Sales Reps getting infected, and I had to use a third-party antivirus program to clean up the mess. The patch management is ok, but LogMeIn does that very well too. The MDM is mediocre and I replaced it with Meraki.

To conclude, InTune does everything poorly compared with its competitors. I now do everything I need much quicker, easier and cheaper with LogMeIn and Merkai, apart from security. For security, I like the look of GFI Cloud, but haven't rolled it out yet. The concept of one portal handling everything (InTune) is very attractive and should be cheaper (in theory), but I now prefer a best of breed approach. So to answer the thread's question: No and No.

@Hubtech said:

well, you sound convinced and solidified on your decision. Good luck good sir. I, and all of my clients, are enjoying the heck out of O365.

Not at all, we'll be migrating to O365 as soon as our onsite Exchange 2010 server and Office 2010 client licences are due an upgrade, probably next year. Exchange 2010 is the last on-site Exchange I will ever run. The reality is we're getting to a point where it doesn't matter what your boss thinks, Microsoft has decided they want SMBs to move to O365 and Office subscriptions, and that is what will happen. They've already scrapped Office OEM licences, and have effectively scrapped Office retail licences (though I'm still clinging on to them by my finger nails). Subscription is the future, like it or not. People who claim not to like "the cloud" had just better get used to it, because that is how it is going to be. I still think O365 uptimes are mediocre, but Microsoft is new to the cloud and can only improve as its products become more mature.

The only real downside for an SMB that I see right now is internet connectivity issues. This may not be so much of an issue in the US, but here in the UK I estimate that the majority of SMBs are still running low bandwidth ADSL connections. This situation will improve, but it's taking a shockingly long time.

@Richard said:

@Carnival-Boy It's on of my all time favorite recipes. Cooking it for the lady friend this weekend.

Sort of made it tonight:

only I'd never heard of broccoli rabe, so made it with broccoli. I've only just discovered broccoli rabe isn't broccoli at all. It was nice all the same!

@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.

@hubtech that's exactly what I'm looking at.

So do the majority of O365 users ditch third-party filtering solutions?

A third of the posts are by a single man with super-human posting abilities, mind,

@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.

Final question (maybe): AD integration with O365 sounds like a pain, but without that how to you easily manage user authentication? How do Outlook and Sharepoint clients login to O365?

It's the bandwidth at our end that concerns me.

Thanks. That's what I suspected.

Sharepoint is an extra $4 per month and you also get Office Online, so it looks pretty cheap? It could also stop users from using Dropbox or USB sticks to take work home, so that would make the business case. It's just speed that concerns me.

Just looked and Postini is still being advertised in the UK for 6 pounds per year, which is around $10 (not $4 - I got my exchange rates muddled). But since it's going, it doesn't really matter. I still wouldn't necessarily give up my 3rd party virus and spam filtering in favour of just using Microsoft.

Quick question: How nicely does on-site Sharepoint integrate with hosted Exchange? Would I be better off migrating to hosted Sharepoint at the same time? We only use Sharepoint Foundation.

Rightly or wrongly, I don't spend any time worrying about Exchange. I spend more time logging onto Microsoft's portal to download my subscription invoices.

If I understand the definition of mailbagging, Postini does this for like $4 per YEAR. We use GFI, which is still dirt cheap, and I'd be tempted to continue using GFI with O365, as I like it's interface and granular spam control.

Another consideration is internet connectivity. We have a 10mb line for 60 office users. I'm not sure that would be enough for O365, given the extra internal e-mails that would be going through it. We tend to use e-mail too much internally, but I have a hard time persuading users to use other options. On the other hand, connectivity would improve for remote workers who complain that their connection to our server is too slow.

@scottalanmiller said:

I think if any temperamental five year old made a browser it would be hard to use.

I'll get my daughter to make one this weekend, and report back.

Weekend free. I used to work Saturdays when I lived in Hong Kong, but it's very unusual here in England. We're a lazy lot!

Good evening @joyfano . Do you work Saturdays or are you starting to wind down for the weekend?