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Deep Dive
Moving to Office
365? Dig deep into
your options first
Microsoft has a handy tool for comparing
options, but you need to use it carefully to
get accurate answers. BY J. PETER BRUZZESE
With Office 365,
there are so
many different
plans and
options that it’s
important to
know what you
gain (or lose)
before you
choose one.
Measure twice, cut once -- this wise adage
explains the value of pausing and making sure you
know the potential results of your decisions. With
Office 365, there are so many different plans
and options that it’s important to know what
you gain (or lose) before you choose one.
On the plus side, if you choose an option
that doesn’t match your needs, it’s
not horribly difficult to alter your plan
and move your users over. In fact, for
organizations with fewer than 300
people, Microsoft provides the Switch
Plans wizard to help you, although
performing the task manually is
easy enough. But for those of
you moving over from an existing
on-premises Exchange, SharePoint, or Lync deployment, you’ll
want to make sure you know
what you gain and lose in the
process before you start.
A good place to start is
Microsoft’s
article
describing the
Office 365 services
and comparing them
to what the on-premises
versions offer. Checking out
these descriptions would show
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To really match
up what you
need with your
budget, you
need to review
the Exchange
Online Service
Description
with this
comparison of
all Office 365 for
business plans
(including
pricing).
a small business (25 or fewer users) that goes
for one of the small-business Office 365 plans
won’t get most of the enterprise-grade features
that Exchange has to offer, such as premium
journaling, data loss prevention, transport rules,
e-discovery, and in-place hold and litigation hold
(most of the regulatory compliance features).
After all, size doesn’t necessarily correlate to
compliance requirements, and many small businesses need these features. In that case, they
should consider instead a midsize business plan.
I’m not sure why Microsoft penalizes small
businesses by giving them fewer features. Maybe
that makes sense for the lowest-tier small-business plan, which costs $5 per month per user.
But it doesn’t make sense for the Small Business
Premium plan, which runs $12.50 per month per
user ($2.50 less than the midsize plan), yet lacks
all the enterprise-grade features the midsize plan
offers. That’s especially odd because Microsoft
sells the Enterprise E1 license for Exchange that
provides most enterprise-grade compliance
features for a mere $8 per month. Maybe the
right option is to get Office 365’s Exchange
through an E1 license and keep using your
on-premises copies of Microsoft Office.
As you review the charts in that Microsoft
comparison article, be sure to read the footnotes. For example, one footnote for on-premises Exchange 2013 clarifies that the chart’s claim
of a 2GB limit for mailbox size is not accurate;
this is the default size, not the maximum as the
chart suggests. Likewise, a footnote on allowable mailbox sizes for Office 365 clarifies that the
50GB maximum size for a mailbox and the 50GB
maximum size for its personal archive do not add
up to 100GB as you would think; there’s 50GB
maximum between the two of them.
To really match up what you need with your
budget, you need to review the Exchange Online
Service Description with this comparison of all
Office 365 for business plans (including pricing).
So that you can manipulate the data to see
which plan best fits your needs, Microsoft has
provided an Excel Web part of that description.
Once you’ve mastered the use of Microsoft’s
comparative material, you’ll be ready to make
the right Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and/or
Lync deployment decision for your company. n
J. Peter Bruzzese is a Microsoft MVP with an
extensive record consulting with companies such
as Goldman Sachs, Solomon Smith Barney, CommVault Systems, and Microsoft.
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J. Peter Bruzzese’s
3 favorite tools for
migrating to Office 365
More users are moving to Office 365, but they’re finding a few
areas that require some help. These three tools can bridge the gaps
J. Peter Bruzzese
With more and
more services,
infrastructure,
and platforms
moving to the
cloud, the need
for good thirdparty tools will
only grow to
enhance the
core offering,
such as
Exchange.
Organizations of all shapes and sizes are
making the move to Office 365 (or some form
of hosted Exchange) in a desire to eliminate
the management of on-premises
hardware, disaster recovery, and
high availability of their email infrastructure.
There are many products
meant to help you migrate to
Office 365. The following are my
three favorites.
In my usage, CodeTwo Office
365 Migration has been an easy
way to get your on-premises
Exchange mailboxes into Office
365’s Exchange, whether you are
doing a complete move of all users
or moving some to Office 365 and
keeping some local in a hybrid
approach. CodeTwo helps move mailboxes
and public folders from on-premises Exchange
2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013. It can also move
mailboxes from Google Apps for Business and
individual Gmail accounts to Office 365. The
best part about this tool is that you can get it
for free: Enterprise Office 365 subscribers can
get a migration license paid by Microsoft if the
enterprise designates CodeTwo its Office 365
migration partner of record.
Mimecast’s Unified Email Management
helps with on-premises, hosted, and Office 365
deployments, depending on the components
you license. They nicely fill gaps around enterprise-grade archiving, antispam/antimalware,
continuity, and large file sends. For example, the
archiving feature ensures that users can access
their sent and received email and restore it if
necessary themselves, saving you time and hassle
as an IT admin. But they can’t delete archived
emails, so your organization’s e-discovery and
compliance remain intact.
In my experience, Mimecast’s continuity
feature -- essentially a cloud-based failover
server for Office 365’s Exchange -- is very useful.
Office 365 goes down at times, as my company
can attest. Mimecast keeps your email up and
accessible during those outages, so users aren’t
affected. When Office 365 is back up, Mimecast
brings Office 365 back up to speed.
ClipTraining’s Office 365 Application Training
is my own company’s product, so I may be biased
about its value. But I truly believe one of the
problems with deploying new OSes and applications is a lack of training, thus keeping users
from taking advantage of their new Windows 8
PC with Office 2013 connected to Office 365. IT
admins know all too well the frustration of seeing
users completely freak out over the new features
we work so hard to implement. From their viewpoint, they’ve been using Windows XP and Office
2003 for a decade, and now need to relearn a set
of tools they strongly depend on every day -- of
course they could use some education. ClipTraining subscribers can make a library of short,
task-based videos available to users, so they can
learn the new features at their convenience and
at their own pace. The videos’ coverage includes
Outlook 2013, SharePoint 2013, and Lync 2013.
With more and more services, infrastructure,
and platforms moving to the cloud, the need for
good third-party tools will only grow to enhance
the core offering, such as Exchange. Some of
those tools exist today, and I encourage you to
use them. n
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How to migrate to
Office 365 step by step
The best way to take advantage of Microsoft’s cloud service is to
move to it incrementally. J. PETER BRUZZESE
52%
of businesses
say they will
ultimately
move all or
some users to
Office 365.
OSTERMAN RESEARCH
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was
your enterprise messaging platform. Yet the
concept of the cloud -- specifically, Microsoft’s
Office 365 -- promises revolutionary changes
of cost savings, risk reduction, technical agility,
and easier management, all beloved by boards
of directors.
Clearly, Office 365 is gaining a signifi-
cant foothold into corporate America’s plans.
Osterman Research, which does marketing
research work for Microsoft and other tech
vendors, has reported that 52 percent of businesses say they will ultimately move all or some
users to Office 365. Office 365 is a good service
that companies should consider adopting -- but
not in one fell swoop.
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The hybrid
approach
can accommodate how
any company
grows, organizes, and
operates “in
any setting,
under any
circumstances.”
BRAD
ANDERSON,
Microsoft’s VP of
Windows Server
& System Center
“CIOs need to recognize the move
to Office 365 as an evolution, not a
revolution,” says Jay Gundotra, CEO
of ENow, a provider of monitoring
and professional services. “As cloud
services become more prevalent in the
enterprise toolkit, those who promote
a hybrid approach -- a mix of on-premises
Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 -- will find
an accelerated time to value. The hybrid strategy
allows for gradual adoption and infrastructure
right-sizing. Moreso, it provides a learning curve
toward best practices with minimal risk exposure. And it’s really how any true paradigm shift
takes hold.”
The hybrid approach can accommodate how
any company grows, organizes, and operates “in
any setting, under any circumstances,” writes
Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s VP of Windows
Server & System Center in his blog. A key reason
for going hybrid is to “help organizations avoid
placing all their eggs in one basket. Having all of
your data in a single place makes you vulnerable.”
It’s no secret that a hybrid Exchange/
Office365 environment poses very real challenges. It can be very time- and labor-intensive
to set up. It’s complex to manage because there
are two separate but equal segments requiring
support. Although Microsoft has made significant progress in its migration processes since the
bad old days of moving from Exchange 2010 to
Office 365 and its Business Productivity Online
Services predecessor, the migration process for
going from Exchange 2013 to Office 365 still
remains overwhelming.
Issues affecting one side of the fence can
directly impact the other: Users may lose the
ability to schedule with one another, lose email,
or lose access to some data. It’s critical to keep
the Exchange and Office 365 sides interoperably
compatible. To do that, you have to start with
planning, end with monitoring -- and pray periodically through the whole process. For example,
creating a hybrid connection will break free/busy
when an organization relationship exists.
The setup and configuration of a hybrid
environment is no trivial task. Challenges abound
from the initial setup of the hybrid components,
the migration of users’ data, and the ongoing
maintenance and monitoring of the overall
system. Besides learning Microsoft’s Office 365
architecture, you have to handle the complexity
of ensuring network devices, Active Directory
Federation Services, DirSync, mail flow, and
certificates are all configured properly.
Once the framework is in place, you should
consider a staged migration, aka a hybrid migration. This approach dramatically reduces the likelihood of disruption and gives administrators more
time to more closely examine email content and
what can be archived. In an enterprise of 10,000
accounts, move just 10 percent of user accounts.
See how it works, how the users adapt. Monitor
and record the issues so that future migrations are
faster and smoother. Create an ongoing process
to migrate additional accounts as you see the
value accelerating and the Microsoft cloud experience continues to improve. Wash, rinse, repeat.
“Hybrid deployments often have several
moving parts that need to be monitored to
ensure reliable messaging and calendaring
services,” notes ENow’s Gundotra. “Success is
predicated on maintaining proper control of the
entire landscape. Careful and vigilant monitoring
allows you to proactively anticipate issues and
track activity and resource usage. It provides the
necessary context to ensure continuity, connectivity, and compliance -- which in turn is what
you need for control.”
A planned and tested migration to a hybrid
cloud/on-premises environment brings together
the benefits of both worlds. And it gives you
the flexibility to decide later if you want to go
all-in with Office 365, remain on-premise, or
maintain a mix. It’s how Rome was built: one
brick at a time. n
J. Peter Bruzzese is a Microsoft MVP with an
extensive record consulting with companies such
as Goldman Sachs, Solomon Smith Barney, CommVault Systems, and Microsoft.
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From unrealistic design
decisions to costly addons, the migration path
to Microsoft Office 365 is
fraught with hidden pitfalls
10 major Office 365
migration gotchas to avoid
J. PETER BRUZZESE
Whether
you are
thinking
of going
hybrid or
are pushing
all in on
Office 365,
you will
undoubtedly run
into wrinkles.
Migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses both large and
small. The upside of moving from an on-premises environment to one hosted online by Microsoft offers compelling benefits. But switcher
beware: Early Office 365 adopters have come
back from their migration path battle-worn by
a slew of unexpected perils they encountered
along the way.
Whether you are thinking of going hybrid
or are pushing all in on Office 365, you will
undoubtedly run into wrinkles. Often in the
process of determining how you will migrate to
your new environment, you miss out on a few
key gotchas. We’ve searched high and low for
the real-world obstacles IT pros have encountered in making the move to Office 365. As you
might imagine, the universal dependence on
email means most gotchas fall into the Exchange
component of Office 365, but we uncovered
significant migration issues with other facets of
Office 365 as well.
Following are our top 10 hidden snags, and
how to avoid them.
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O F F I C E 3 65 G O T C H A # 1
Allowing migration
chatter to become
migration confusion
Y
If you’re
looking
for solid,
step-bystep help in
deploying
Office 365,
check out
Exchange
Server
Deployment
Assistant.
This free tool
from Microsoft will
allow you
to choose a
scenario that
makes sense
for your
organization’s needs.
ou don’t have to look far for advice when it
comes to migrating to Office 365. Everybody
and their sister is offering tidbits of deployment
and migration assistance -- or looking for them.
Opinions are great, and simple commiseration
with admins having similar migration pains is
sometimes even better. But all the talk and advice
can get bewildering, especially when it comes to
the details of deployment and migration.
If you’re looking for solid, step-by-step help
in deploying Office 365, check out Exchange
Server Deployment Assistant. This free tool from
Microsoft will allow you to choose a scenario
that makes sense for your organization’s needs.
Answer a few simple questions, and Exchange
Server Deployment Assistant gives you all the
steps necessary to make your migration work,
including how to set up single sign-on, AD
synchronization, certificate configuration, and
more.
hybrid, and for how long, is a dilemma worth
deliberating.
O F F I C E 3 6 5 G O T C H A #3
Failing to ensure prerequisites are met for
hybrid deployments
Y
ou’ve done your due diligence on your
design decision and have decided the hybrid
approach is best. You’re going to blend some
of your existing on-premises Exchange instances
with Office 365 accounts. But there’s a catch.
You may not be able to connect to Office 365
from your on-premises environment if you don’t
have the prerequisites in place.
Hybrid deployments can be configured with
Exchange 2007 through 2013 environments.
However, with Exchange 2007/2010 environments there must be at least one Exchange 2013
Client Access and Mailbox server in place to run
the Hybrid Configuration wizard. It’s recommended you run the two roles on the same server.
If your organization doesn’t have Exchange 2013
(CU1 or higher) in place, you’ll have to update
your environment before going hybrid.
O F F I C E 3 65 G O T C H A #2
Making unrealistic
design decisions
regarding on-premises
vs. cloud
U
nless it’s a greenfield deployment of
Exchange Online through Office 365, you’re
looking at a migration. In that case, with an
existing Exchange environment, you’re typically
taking a hybrid approach, mixing on-premises
Exchange mail use with Office 365 use.
How long to remain in hybrid mode depends
on your organizational goals. You may maintain
a hybrid environment for an extended (or even
indefinite) period because you don’t wish to
move all mailboxes to the cloud, allowing greater
on-premises control for certain mailboxes. Or
you may have sites that experience latency issues
connecting to cloud-based mailboxes, in which
case you should consider maintaining on-premises Exchange servers for those locations.
Unfortunately, some decisions will not be
cut-and-dry. Whatever you do, don’t fall into
the one-solution-fits-all trap. To hybrid or not to
O F F I C E 3 6 5 G O T C H A #4
Choosing the wrong
support plan
O
ffice 365 support plans are by no means
equal. Larger organizations are unlikely
to get tripped up by this gotcha, but smaller
shops that require a hybrid approach beware:
It’s essential to have a plan in place that supports
Azure Active Directory synchronization if you’re
going hybrid. All of the Enterprise, Government,
Academic and Midsize plans support Azure AD
sync; as a result, they also support hybrid deployment. The Home and Small Business flavors of
Office 365, however, do not offer Azure AD sync,
and therefore do not support hybrid deployments. Don’t be penny-wise, pound-foolish.
O F F I C E 3 6 5 G O T C H A #5
Getting derailed during
legacy archive export
M
ost on-premises legacy archive solutions
won’t work with Office 365. You move the
mailbox to the cloud, and it breaks the stubs,
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If you
think
Office 365
is an allyou-caneat buffet,
you are right
– to a degree.
leaving users unable to access archived email.
There are a variety of ways to get your data out
of your legacy archive solution. Your archive
solution might have export capabilities to help
extract the data, but the benchmark speed for
the export might be 1GB to 2GB per hour (yikes).
In this case, you would be exporting the data to
PSTs to then upload to Office 365. This may be a
real problem -- you’ll be rehydrating the data up
to its original size because you won’t be able to
use deduplication. You will also have problems
if your archive’s databases are corrupt, because
the legacy archive API may not handle unhealthy
indexes or databases well.
A second approach is to use the native export
tools in the legacy archive solution to rehydrate
the stubbed messages back into the mailbox
directly (this works for mailbox archives but not
journals). Again, the rehydration process can be a
real issue because you’ll need to allocate however
many terabytes of storage (depending on your
data size) or rehydrate one mailbox at a time.
You can also look to a third-party tool to
handle the export, rehydration, and upload
process but you want to make sure the tool is
solid.
Either way, legacy archive export is hairy
business.
O F F I C E 3 65 G O T C H A #6
Grinding to a halt
during data import
E
xporting legacy data is half the battle.
Ingesting this data into Office 365 presents a range of problems, one of which is that
Exchange Web Services (EWS) hits a wall at
400GB per day, with a 250MB- to 500MB-perhour typical ingestion speed. If you’re looking at
large amounts of data, on the order of multiple
terabytes, it’s going to take a long time.
But the bottleneck might not be EWS; your
Internet bandwidth could just as easily slow
you down. Depending on the data volumes you
are ingesting, it can grind to a near halt. There
are several third-party solutions to consider
for assisting in this regard, or you might think
about moving your archive data from an
on-premises solution to a cloud-based solution
other than Microsoft.
OFFICE 365 GOTCHA #7
Failing to know the
limitations of Exchange
Online
M
essage retrieval is a common pain point
for admins. With Office 365, that pain can
be unbearable, as Office 365 doesn’t perform
message retrieval beyond the deleted item retention limit, which is 14 days by default.
There’s an easy solution: Alter your deleted
item retention limit. Of course, it’s a little trickier
with Office 365. As opposed to on-premises
Exchange, where you can touch the servers
directly and alter the retention time, Office 365
requires a remote PowerShell connection to
make the change. Here’s the bad news: The max
retention limit is 30 days. That’s it!
There are two ways around this gotcha. You
can put mailboxes on Litigation Hold, in which
case you may look to add the archive add-on
piece for limitless hold, or you can implement an
archive solution that works with Office 365 so
that messages are retained and easily recovered.
O F F I C E 3 6 5 G O T C H A #8
Failing to factor in the
cost of à la carte add-ons
IF
you think Office 365 is an all-you-can-eat
buffet, you are right -- to a degree. Many
features you might expect from the online suite
are built in. But to include certain features, you
will have to spend a bit more money to get the
service you want.
Be sure to thoroughly vet your plan’s offerings and research the “purchase services” option
through your Office 365 dashboard to determine
whether any of the paid services will be required
for your organizational needs. Some examples
include Visio Pro for Office 365, Project Pro for
Office 365, Yammer Enterprise, and the like.
OFFICE 365 GOTCHA #9
Assuming SharePoint
Online is as robust as
SharePoint Server
G
iven the robustness of Exchange Online
compared with on-premises Exchange, you
might be led to believe that SharePoint Online
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and Lync Online offer a feature set
in line with their on-premises counterparts. In the main, you won’t be
disappointed by the differences. But
don’t assume you’ll get everything
when you make the switch. Take
claims-based authentication, for
example; if you rely on that feature
with SharePoint Server, you’ll find
it isn’t supported by any flavor of
SharePoint Online. So be sure to
note all the features you depend on,
whether they are supported, and
which plans support them.
I was personally surprised to see
that email-enabled lists and libraries
are not supported, but site mailboxes are supported. Remote BLOB
storage is another feature that is
not supported, though that makes
sense, given the lack of local storage.
Some features won’t be missed, depending
on your plan and needs. But if you work with
SharePoint and have a good amount of data
held within it, you might want to consider a
third-party solution if you cannot migrate the
data manually. Microsoft doesn’t provide any
kind of SharePoint migration tool, but does offer
two manual SharePoint migration tips:
One way to manually move content to SharePoint Online is by connecting the SharePoint
Library to SharePoint Workspace. You can
then upload content to SharePoint Workspace and it will automatically synchronize
these files to SharePoint Online. Another
manual approach is to use the capability of
SharePoint to upload multiple files. This will
allow you to upload batches of files at once.
I was personally surprised to see
that email-enabled lists and libraries are not
supported, but site mailboxes are supported.
OFFICE 365 GOTCHA #10
Thinking Lync Online
means hassle-free full
telephony
T
he complexity of on-premises Lync setup is
daunting. For most admins, setting up Lync
means going as far as getting it up and running
to provide IM and presence information for
your users. Those who switch to full telephony
through Lync Server on-premise are very likely to
have brought in consultants to help.
With Office 365, you might be tempted to
think you get all the benefits of Lync without the
on-premises setup hell. That’s true, to a degree.
Within your Lync network you’ll have IM and presence, along with videoconferencing, Lync-to-Lync
calls, and so on; however, Lync Online, by itself,
does not offer true VoIP telephony. It can connect
to an existing system (PBX/IP-PBX), but only using
on-premises equipment; be sure to plan accordingly. Note: Microsoft is planning on allowing
for PSTN connectivity according to its road map,
but this is still not a replacement for your existing
system or solution, simply a means of connecting
your Lync account with a PSTN number. n
J. Peter Bruzzese is a Microsoft MVP with an
extensive record consulting with companies such
as Goldman Sachs, Solomon Smith Barney, CommVault Systems, and Microsoft.