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Hi, I’m Ann Vu, a product manager covering migration on the Exchange team. Many organizations are at a decision point where they are considering whether to upgrade their on-premises email system, or move to the cloud.
Here’s a summary of some key factors to consider as you choose between the deployment options.
Exchange Online for Office 365 for enterprises
Exchange Server 2010
Cost
Without the need to purchase, upgrade, and manage hardware, Exchange Online can help reduce total cost of ownership (not to mention the burden on overstretched IT staff). Updates, upgrades, and 24/7 IT-level phone support are included in the cost of most Office 365 plans.
Product improvements in the areas of storage, high availability, administration, and more help reduce TCO. You must still deploy and manage software and hardware in-house.
Management & control
Frees you from many day-to-day management tasks while providing control over policies, security, compliance, and other key aspects of the service.
Provides the greatest degree of control over configuration and customization.
Integration with other productivity workloads
Automatically configured to work with Lync Online and SharePoint Online.
Designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Lync and Microsoft SharePoint, but integration must be configured and managed.
Reporting
Rich reports and data available but not at the same level of detail as Exchange Server.
Complete visibility into the deployment down to the level of server logs.
Anywhere access
Accessed securely over the Internet, and therefore inherently provides mobile access by default.
Mobile access is easy to set up and manage, but you must deploy it yourself.
Mailbox size
25 GB by default.
Configurable to meet your organization’s needs and policies.
Compliance
Same feature set available as in Exchange Server 2010.
Personal Archive, legal hold, multi-mailbox search, and other features help make compliance easier.
Anti-spam/ antivirus
Forefront Online Protection for Exchange included at no extra cost.
Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange or Microsoft Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server are included in some of our prouct suites, such as the Enterprise CAL Suite, Exchange Enterprise CAL with services or may be licensed individually.
Regulatory compliance
Meets many compliance requirements and Office 365 datacenters have a number of certifications. For organizations that need to keep data within a certain geographical location, Exchange Server 2010 may be the optimal choice.
Can be configured to meet virtually any compliance need.
Reliability and high availability
High availability and reliability built in, including a financially backed, 99.9% uptime guarantee.
New high availability architecture makes it easier and less expensive than ever before to implement high availability.
When considering cloud vs. on-premises deployments, remember that it’s not an either/or choice. Office 365 supports hybrid deployments in which users on Exchange Online and users on Exchange Server 2010 can work with one another seamlessly. With these hybrid capabilities, you can migrate over time as you are comfortable, or maintain a mixed Exchange environment indefinitely.
Because Exchange Server and Exchange Online are aligned in terms of features and capabilities (see our previous blog post for details), and because they support rich hybrid capabilities, your business can choose how to deploy email based on business goals, not technical limitations. For example:
The bottom line is that you can choose Exchange in the cloud, on-premises, or both. Regardless of the deployment option you choose, there’s no need to sacrifice the capabilities you expect from Exchange.
This post was a quick overview of the factors involved in choosing between a cloud, on-premises, or hybrid deployment for your email. For a deeper look, check out this whitepaper recently published by the Exchange team: How Should Your Organization Deploy Microsoft® Exchange?
Hi Ann, That's said to come from End User perspective. However, If I am an IT Provider, How would I go about the be Microsoft Cloud service reseller instead? Is there a way to be Office 365 provider instead?
Thanks
Alex
We are currently using Exchange 2003… Can we do hybrid solution ? move 10% of our user to Office 365 while maintaining the same Active Directory domain in house ?
Can we do single sign on from Office 365 against our own Active Directory domain ? Do I need to buy the Office 365 CAL for the “Resource” mailbox like conference room ?
Can we sync the Free & Busy directory between our in house Exchange and the Office 365 under the same domain?
Do you have the technical URL to help customer migrate from in house Active Directory Domain to Office 365? Or a phone # we could call?
Hi Alexisk - Office 365 services including Exchange Online are all managed and operated by Microsoft. However, if you are interested in being a reseller or partner, go to this site for more info: www.quickstartonlineservices.com/.../Default.html
Hi Chung - You can definitely deploy in a hybrid model. You can also maintain your Active Directory in-house; you would use the DirSync tool in order to sync your on-prem AD info to the cloud and move mailboxes you'd like from your on-prem Exchange environment to Exchange Online. If you'd like a single sign-on experience, you can deploy ADFS to achieve that; users would then authenticate on-prem.
You can also do free-busy sync in this hybrid approach although it takes a few more steps since the way free/busy information is synchronized is different in Exchange 2003 than in 2007 or 2010. If you go through the Exchange Deployment Assistant, select the middle button for hybrid. This will ask you questions about your environment and requirements and will give you detailed steps on how to deploy in a hybrid fashion:
technet.microsoft.com/.../default.aspx
You can also find info in the Exchange Online service description for general questions on features and availability: www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx
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Hi Ann,
For various reasons, we'd like to use O365 with the minimum user data populated up to the cloud. I found this article which lists the attributes support.microsoft.com/.../2256198 but it doesn't say what the actual minimum required are. My guess would be first name, surname, displayName, email and userPrincipalName - but are you able to confirm or direct me to an article that outlines what the minimum attributes are?
Audience: Exchange/Office 365 for Enterprises Administrators
I had previously blogged about the