Critical differences between Exchange 2010/13 and Office 365

[funkyfin2000]

Hi There,

 

Can anyone point me towards or know any of the critical differences between exchange 2010/13 and Office 365 online exchange A2 plan?

 

Looking at the arguments for use for one of the other in effect.

 

Cheers in advance.

 

Rich

[FN-GM]

You can't use the full address list and custom GAL's in office 365 that you can in Exchange.

[jamesbmarshall]

Can anyone point me towards or know any of the critical differences between exchange 2010/13 and Office 365 online exchange A2 plan?

 

Looking at the arguments for use for one of the other in effect.

 

Obviously, Exchange Server rocks but there are very good reasons for going to Exchange Online.

 

First, and foremost in the education world, is total cost of ownership. Forget feature differences, one is free and gives everyone a 25GB mailbox, and the other costs money for tin, licences, air con, power, disk space, backup, etc.

 

Unless you're a really advanced Exchange customer and make extensive use of third party tooling that requires direct access to an Exchange server (i.e. to customise or extend the OWA experience), or some of the less well-known capabilities of Exchange, then Exchange Online can pretty much cover everything you need.

 

It's possible to support custom address lists, address book policies and GALs. It can also handle auditing and investigation, bad word lists, transport rules, public folders, disclaimers, ActiveSync, archiving (some options cost though), etc. The list gets bigger and bigger with every iteration.

 

If I had my network manager hat on (which is getting pretty dusty sitting in the corner looking neglected) and I had to pick between running a full-blown Exchange org on-prem, or moving it out to "the cloud" then I think it would be a no-brainer.

 

AND if you are the type who has cold feet about the cloud, you can do Exchange Hybrid if you wanted to keep some users (i.e. staff) on-prem and some (i.e. students) in the cloud.

 

The biggest pushback I hear about moving to an online provider is "what if my broadband goes down, my users still need to communicate, especially staff". My argument back is that if your broadband is that bad that it goes down that often then you have bigger problems to worry about, and Exchange Server is still a fantastic product.

Edited July 29, 2013 by jamesbmarshall

[funkyfin2000]

James! I know I could rely on you to form a great MS argument and poignant it is too! Thank you for putting fingers to keyboard for this, very useful. I know it's a massive detailed argument and impossible to note down all the ins and outs but that's a great starting point.

 

Thank you.

 

Rich

[EPCHS]

You can't use the full address list and custom GAL's in office 365 that you can in Exchange.

 

I only know the basics of Exchange and O365, but I was reading an article the other day that mentioned that you can now use custom GAL's in O365. It's only accessible via PowerShell though.

 

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