Office 365 or Google Apps

[SomeoneEls]

Hi there,
does anyone have any experience with office 365? Looking to move an in house SBS 2003 server to Office 365 with just a local AD/File server is this possible?
Sticking with MS would be easiest as people in the office use public folders and that quite a bit.

If not anyone got any experience moving a people to Google Apps for business, is it easy enough? There would be about 75 gigs of mail in total to upload which could take a while though.
All users use Outlook 2007


All/any advice is appreciated, I know the post is a bit slim on details, just shout if you want to know something else

 

[CeeBee]

we haven't gone Office365 yet.... planned for early next year
we're part of global organisation, founder group in Japan, we, as part of EMEA, fall under Europe (France)
All used to have inhouse Lotus Notes mail server, this year feb made the changes.
European group (incl us) went to Microsoft Online services, while Japan went Google Apps.
My understanding is that overall costs, complexity, etc, are way better with MS BPOS, than Google Aps.
At least MS Online services is way better for us than LN, not having our own mail servers to contend with, and better web-access of mailbox.
Only snag.... with South African internet ... could be problems sometimes having a mail server online... everything goes via internet, so if internet is off, even inter office, mails between users in the same building is stopped

 

[TheGuy]

Just get good redundency like an adsl and a leased line for backup

 

[Elimentals]

we haven't gone Office365 yet.... planned for early next year
we're part of global organisation, founder group in Japan, we, as part of EMEA, fall under Europe (France)
All used to have inhouse Lotus Notes mail server, this year feb made the changes.
European group (incl us) went to Microsoft Online services, while Japan went Google Apps.
My understanding is that overall costs, complexity, etc, are way better with MS BPOS, than Google Aps.
At least MS Online services is way better for us than LN, not having our own mail servers to contend with, and better web-access of mailbox.
Only snag.... with South African internet ... could be problems sometimes having a mail server online... everything goes via internet, so if internet is off, even inter office, mails between users in the same building is stopped

I know with Google Apps and Chrome it is possible to run in Offline mode See http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=139154

Does Office 365 have the same ability? Cause that should sort out the internet outage concern.

My company recently moved our files to http://box.net/ for our office documents, mostly because of the internet issues as well.

[video=youtube;IcjgqQTPFx4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcjgqQTPFx4[/video]

 

[The_Unbeliever]

It is nice to have all your documentation/etc "in the cloud", but have you considered the following issues thoroughly?

1. Backups of said documentation. Don't ignore this as point 2 will make it clear.
2. What will you do should Google/M$/$cloud_service_provider suddenly decide, without reason, to terminate your account? It had happened before, and will happen again.
3. Internet (international) outage - Sure you say, just get a leased line for backup, but what if your workers/employers are in the field, and they get cut off from vital documentation?
4. Will your documents and other sensitive data really be safe from snooping and prying eyes?

By putting all your documents "in the cloud" you really are just outsourcing. Outsourcing doesn't work always, not especially with IT and mission-critical services.

 

[Elimentals]

It is nice to have all your documentation/etc "in the cloud", but have you considered the following issues thoroughly?

1. Backups of said documentation. Don't ignore this as point 2 will make it clear.
2. What will you do should Google/M$/$cloud_service_provider suddenly decide, without reason, to terminate your account? It had happened before, and will happen again.
3. Internet (international) outage - Sure you say, just get a leased line for backup, but what if your workers/employers are in the field, and they get cut off from vital documentation?
4. Will your documents and other sensitive data really be safe from snooping and prying eyes?

By putting all your documents "in the cloud" you really are just outsourcing. Outsourcing doesn't work always, not especially with IT and mission-critical services.

That is why we went the Box route. It integrates with Google Doc's as well as having the ability to sync locally. The version functions on it works like a charm as you can always trace who made the last changes.

On security Box uses 256-bit encryption and can set passwords per document, share or folder. Best of all, you can integrate it into your AD or in our case our LDAP Server.

Also the documents can be used on Android or iOS and applications like AirShare and Documents on the Go.

I dont think the solution would work for everyone as it is pricy but seeing that our workforce is all over the planet it ticks all our boxes.

 

[zaraalyssa]

We switched to google apps in a nationwide company and if everyone has a decent Internet connection, it's easy as pie. The more you research it, the more business problems it solves

 

[gongers]

1. Backups of said documentation. Don't ignore this as point 2 will make it clear.

Most cloud solutions allow you to syncronise on-premise with in the cloud data usually to allow you work off-line when you need to, Exchange Online (in Office 365) does this as part of Outlook's functionality, SharePoint Online through SharePoint Workspace. This is however NOT a backup as user error in those documents will result in said error syncing back to the cloud. That is where checking documents out and version control are awesome... SharePoint does this well. GoogleDocs? No idea.

2. What will you do should Google/M$/$cloud_service_provider suddenly decide, without reason, to terminate your account? It had happened before, and will happen again.

It has happened before and it will no doubt happen again, yes. However these cases are rare and have always been etreme circumstances. Again, syncing your data (see above) makes sense here.

3. Internet (international) outage - Sure you say, just get a leased line for backup, but what if your workers/employers are in the field, and they get cut off from vital documentation?

This, if anything, is a call for the move to cloud and not against it. With your data in the cloud it would take an act of God to disrupt all possible avenues of connectivity to that data from all roaming users. If you hosted it all in-house then it would only take your multiple lines going down...

4. Will your documents and other sensitive data really be safe from snooping and prying eyes?

Safer in the secure datacentre as opposed to your open-plan office space? Safer behind 128bit encrypted network links (SSL) as opposed to your unencrypted LAN or WEP or WPA2 Wireless links? Or are you concerned that Microsoft is reading your documents? Why would they?

By putting all your documents "in the cloud" you really are just outsourcing. Outsourcing doesn't work always, not especially with IT and mission-critical services.

This I can totally support. Going to the Cloud should not be something you do lightly. It IS outsourcing and you should only ever do that to things that are a commodity you could buy anywhere and you should only buy it from a company you can rely on.

But we do need to look at outsourcing some of the old, commodity-type IT work so that we can focus on the things that add real value to our businesses.