O365 : Looking for someone to show us the way

[Seb1780]

Finally, after years of cajoling, our school is beginning to see that their might be some benefit in using O365. To help me on this road to enlightenment I'd like to hear from others who have gone down this route. Is there anyone in the East Anglia region willing to share experiences with me?

[Snuffkins]

We're not in the region, but i thought I'd comment. We configured a hybrid exchange a few years ago setup AD synchronisation, which has worked really well and started migrating mailboxes over in stages.

 

All of our mailboxes are hosted in Exchange online now and we only use an exchange instance on premises to manage email attributes etc. We preferred the hybrid option at the time we were doing it, but there are a couple of ways of doing it: https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/ways-to-migrate-multiple-email-accounts-to-office-365-0a4913fe-60fb-498f-9155-a86516418842

 

We've since started to roll out the use of OneDrive for staff and students and plan to move most of our end user storage that way, reducing the need for both on premises storage and remote access to our on premises storage.

 

We're also making use of Sites to replace our existing on premises SharePoint and using Teams. We're using Salamander to do most of the hard work and that seems to be working well. We're just testing at the moment, but getting some good feedback from departments, especially around OneNote notebooks and audio feedback etc. We'll hopefully be using Skype for Business to replace our aging phone system as well soon.

 

One consideration for the hybrid configuration, which has actually come up on another thread recently is that once it's done, you will always need a way of managing your users email attributes on premises, whether that's with an installation of exchange or ADSIEdit or a 3rd party tool, the 2 latter options are unsupported.

 

For us everything so far has been a very positive experience and we do get good feedback around it. Broadband is a consideration, but these days i wouldn't imagine that would be an issue, but it is something to look at before moving services externally. Not necessarily the bandwidth, but the resilience.

 

If you have any questions about anything I'd be happy to help if i can.

[Snuffkins]

As a side note if you did go with a hybrid deployment and at a later stage wanted to decommission the on premises exchange, but still use AD Sync and require and instance of exchange to manage email attributes, you should be able to run an instance of exchange without requiring the license for it as far as I've been told by MS. It would probably be best to contact O365 Support about it so you have it in writing, but that's the information I received recently when I queried it.