Office 365 Adding Local Exchange Server

[Soulfish]

Yep paid to do a job and do it well. Stick everything in the cloud and no one will need IT staff as if anything goes wrong, it'll be down to the service provider!!

 

Just wanted to cover that not needing IT staff point - the company I work at has almost all systems hosted out of "cloud" services (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and our IT department is about 10% of the entire company. It's grown in size not got smaller as we've moved everything to cloud services, sure the jobs not the same but "IT" is about delivering transformation then just making sure the service is working these days.

 

Edit:

Just to add though that ultimately it is of course your network and viewpoint - I've just got a totally different view about where IT is heading

Edited November 16, 2018 by Soulfish

[KK20]

Office 365 is free to education - that is true; Office 365A1 is free to education. Have you tried changing your password with office 365A1? How do you approach syncing the changes back to AD with your free version? I didn't even bother looking past that hurdle as that is an instant dealbreaker. How do you pure office 365 guys handle spam, I assume you don't rely on MS internal spam filtering only (we use puremessage for our spam filtering, reporting and control ), when I looked at 3rd party options both in front/behind office 365 they were more expensive than a comparative exchange plugin etc - for example "sophos central" was a more expensive solution than onsite sophos. Other packages are available and im sure someone else will have a cheaper o365 spam solution but I would need a single management gateway for all AV/AM/AS services such as sophos central (online) or SUM etc. I did forget, A1 plan also doesnt have access, for good or bad our curriculum has access taught in the lower years with mysql plus workbench in the upper/6th form

 

Having office 365 as a cloud only option changes backup routines too. How do you guys backup? Do you use azure or a 3rd party? Do you backup to local? Again, when I looked at this, the options were more expensive than our onsite solution for a similar like for like rotation. Are you happy with a single point of backup?

 

The costs did not add up for us - ive already said what it costs us for an exchange license per year, o365 (im assuming you are using EES the same as me) works out in real terms (for me at this time) at about £7.50 per user based on 95 "knowledge workers",

a comparable EES desktop package plus a premium A5 plan (needed for password sync alone that A3 wont provide) would work out at £11 - thats a huge increase, even moving to A3 would be £9.25 (these notes are one year old when the last EES changes came in) - I work on cost per user by factoring total cost by user obviously we pay by "knowledge worker" these days, plus the server licensing - I am well below the 1000 count so do not qualify for the higher discounts and am wondering how you guys are getting cheaper than EES pricing for your office 365 plans? These aren't secret costs, ive already said what the VM is, hardly a powerhouse VM; Unless you are 100% in the cloud then you will still need to maintain an onsite presence of servers and an onsite presence of backup; that is a sunk cost regardless of your exchange/o365 solution and will need the same level of maintenance - one extra VM is nothing to our burden and we already have datacenter licences for our nodes. As for exchange reliability, what outages have you actually experienced before? Exchange has been rock solid for us, it has never "frozen", never locked up, the VM that it lives on does nothing other than exchange and puremessage though, no other services and that is how I have had all my exchange servers (I would have preferred server core but that wasnt an option in the past, I believe 2019 does support core though). I do know of a school in the county that has gone 100% online (no local storage, onedrive and cloud AD etc). Im not going to discuss someone elses network but I am aware of the issues and pains that goes on. I can point to more news articles with o365 outages than I have ever had (although I cannot say if they affect everyone when an outage happens, I do not have o365 and cannot say what metrics you receive), I cannot be bothered to search for onedrive outages or how often this happens (if ever at all). Even MS have a leeway of 45minutes per month. I reboot the email server for updates once per week, that takes on average 5-10 minutes to shutdown and restart the VM - I also choose schedule the time based on low use (sunday at 3AM). Taking routine updates into account I have had fewer outages then o365 over my 10 years; feel free to take your pinch of salt it bothers me not an iota. I installed exchange 2016 just over a year ago and I haven't touched it since (insofar as installation or tweaking, the patches are automatic, the server is scheduled to restart automatically once per week) and it took me 5 working days to migrate, 2 to get the exchange set up and migrate a few test people, the rest of the time was waiting for migrating mailboxes and finally switching off the old server. I followed the MS migration best practice (apart from resources which I ignored. There will never be a time we have all our mailboxes active and the duty cycle MS base their mailbox resource calulations on is way above our own usage).

 

The other elephant in the room is internet bandwidth. Outlook is not so much a hog of data but is a timely hog of data. Despite all the protestations from the IT department or all the other plethora of options staff have, some old school staff will still email their work home, they will still email school work to pupils - it doesn't matter what sharepoint portals exist, home access plus, intranet pages, VLEs or other well trodden paths, they will still insist on expanding my exchange database with their swollen documents. 100/100 wont be enough, then 200/200 looks a little shaky, oh look 500/500 is affordable. This is all extra expense though, expense that isnt needed but to run office 365 however. This is also dependent on whether you can GET that sort of bandwidth we are geographically locked on a hill in the lake district. I have a beautiful view out of my window but the internet sucks, we use a local wireless point to point connection for our 100/100 - very reliable with an SLA but still not perfect. Our backup is a normal ADSL2 line as there is no fibre ducting near us and no BT infinity to the area either. I am quite happy to accept that this is a user issue and a training issue rather than a real problem though, ongoing and a regular inset article from me...

 

My point is, no one size fits all. If office 365 works well for you then great. Don't discount everyone else as not all situations are the same. If microsoft stop selling exchange then we will migrate to whatever is appropriate and pay whatever we need to, that is just life; perhaps costs will parity over time, perhaps our rural location will get a wealthy landowner to pay for fibre trunking (that we can utilise).

 

Anyway, glad you are happy with your setup, we are happy with ours.

 

Ironically I dont think ive answered the OP question. Hybrid doesn't work that direction (it is local to cloud not the other way round), what you would do is install a local exchange instance, migrate to the local instance, then activate hybrid on the local with your just-migrated-from tenant.

Edited November 19, 2018 by KK20

[Soulfish]

Office 365 is free to education - that is true; Office 365A1 is free to education. Have you tried changing your password with office 365A1? How do you approach syncing the changes back to AD with your free version? I didn't even bother looking past that hurdle as that is an instant dealbreaker.

This is something I'd agree with you on. Unless you have AAD P1/P2 licenses self-service password reset (SSPR) is not great in O365. There are work arounds (making sure that users are educated that they can only change their password on-prem, implementing MS Identity Manager with a public facing SSPR service) but none are as a nice or as clean as just letting users change password in O365.

 

How do you pure office 365 guys handle spam, I assume you don't rely on MS internal spam filtering only (we use puremessage for our spam filtering, reporting and control ), when I looked at 3rd party options both in front/behind office 365 they were more expensive than a comparative exchange plugin etc - for example "sophos central" was a more expensive solution than onsite sophos. Other packages are available and im sure someone else will have a cheaper o365 spam solution but I would need a single management gateway for all AV/AM/AS services such as sophos central (online) or SUM etc.

 

We send/receive hundreds of millions of emails a month and only relying on Exchange Online Protection. It works for us, and we've compared it to alot of very expensive third parties. We've recently taken to also using O365 ATP to suplement that but this was compared against other (more expensive) services that did similar things, and again the MS version was chosen. I don't know why you'd run additional spam filtering; the EOP solution is one of the best on the market and MS even have the numbers to back this up - https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/64345 you want to skip to around the 55ish minute mark to see how they compare to other services.

 

Having office 365 as a cloud only option changes backup routines too. How do you guys backup? Do you use azure or a 3rd party? Do you backup to local? Again, when I looked at this, the options were more expensive than our onsite solution for a similar like for like rotation. Are you happy with a single point of backup?

 

We don't backup and of our O365 content. We have over 2PB of email in O365 and over 700TB in SharePoint Online - at these volumes you just can't look at external backup services. Our risk assessment on this was that the backup service included within O365 by MS (that we have made use of) together with the split-datacenter active-active topology was good enough for us - and we loose millions for every minute of downtime so we spend a lot to prevent this from happening. I speak to a lot of other large Fortune 500 companies and most take similar approaches to us with regards to backup.

 

The costs did not add up for us and I can point to more news articles with o365 outages than I have ever had (although I cannot say if they affect everyone when an outage happens, I do not have o365 and cannot say what metrics you receive). Even MS have a leeway of 45minutes per month. I reboot the email server for updates once per week, that takes on average 5-10 minutes to shutdown and restart the VM - I also choose schedule the time based on low use (sunday at 3AM). Taking routine updates into account I have had fewer outages then o365 over my 10 years; feel free to take your pinch of salt it bothers me not an iota. I installed exchange 2016 just over a year ago and I haven't touched it since (insofar as installation or tweaking, the patches are automatic, the server is scheduled to restart automatically once per week) and it took me 5 working days to migrate, 2 to get the exchange set up and migrate a few test people, the rest of the time was waiting for migrating mailboxes and finally switching off the old server. I followed the MS migration best practice. Unless you are 100% in the cloud then you will still need to maintain an onsite presence of servers and an onsite presence of backup; that is a sunk cost regardless of your exchange/o365 solution and will need the same level of maintenance - one extra VM is nothing to our burden and we already have datacenter licences for our nodes. As for exchange reliability, what outages have you actually experienced before? Exchange has been rock solid for us, it has never "frozen", never locked up, the VM that it lives on does nothing other than exchange and puremessage though, no other services and that is how I have had all my exchange servers (I would have preferred server core but that wasnt an option in the past, I believe 2019 does support core though). I do know of a school in the county that has gone 100% online (no local storage, onedrive and cloud AD etc). Im not going to discuss someone elses network but I am aware of the issues and pains that goes on.

 

For us I can point to one Azure AD outage back in 2016 that caused us some problems. Outside of that we have MS telling us about outages that we didn't even notice. As a commercial customer we have a commercially backed SLA - we've never claimed on it, other than for the Azure AD problems.

 

The other elephant in the room is internet bandwidth. Outlook is not so much a hog of data but is a timely hog of data. Despite all the protestations from the IT department or all the other plethora of options staff have, some old school staff will still email their work home, they will still email school work to pupils - it doesn't matter what sharepoint portals exist, home access plus, intranet pages, VLEs or other well trodden paths, they will still insist on expanding my exchange database with their swollen documents. 100/100 wont be enough, then 200/200 looks a little shaky, oh look 500/500 is affordable. This is all extra expense though, expense that isnt needed but to run office 365 however. This is also dependent on whether you can GET that sort of bandwidth we are geographically locked on a hill in the lake district. I have a beautiful view out of my window but the internet sucks, we use a local wireless point to point connection for our 100/100 - very reliable with an SLA but still not perfect. Our backup is a normal ADSL2 line as there is no fibre ducting near us and no BT infinity to the area either. I am quite happy to accept that this is a user issue and a training issue rather than a real problem though, ongoing and a regular inset article from me...

I'd agree that yes you do need internet, but you'd be surprised at how well O365 works on poor internet connections. We have offices everywhere and large numbers of those offices in south america/Affrica/Asia are quite frankly on wet pieces of string. We'd love them to be able to get ADSL - it would probably work better . It is an expectation management game though - those users expect it to be a bit slower because they know what to expect, and I do accept that teachers + students aren't normally that paitent when things are slow

 

My point is, no one size fits all. If office 365 works well for you then great. Don't discount everyone else as not all situations are the same. If microsoft stop selling exchange then we will migrate to whatever is appropriate and pay whatever we need to, that is just life; perhaps costs will parity over time, perhaps our rural location will get a wealthy landowner to pay for fibre trunking (that we can utilise).

Totally agree that there isn't one size fits all. I'm just a big believer that O365 is getting very close to that

[KK20]

my apologies, I made an edit in the meantime. I have added more on our costs, when I costed things out the realtime cost was eitehr 25% or 50% more per user on a comparable 365 plan. This was licensing alone, I did not factor in a hardware or hardware maintenance cost as I simply don't have one - there is more than enough capacity in our nodes to run exchange. I should add a disclaimer that our A1 tenant is active, I have a WAP active and sync to our AD azure "free" - I leverage this for our adobe software. I did have a trial of A1 and found it lacking, I have not chosen to run hybrid mode and have deactivated office 365 applications. I am trialling on demand onedrive sync and opening up the apps for use at home but there is no demand. Even when we had the old rights to office-at-home, this wasnt taken up much.

 

I think the difference between us is that we are much smaller than you (we do not send millions of emails), the resources I am using onsite is far lower than you have; our entire infrastructure storage arrays are 6.4Tb usable each, the backup arrays are a mere 36Tb useable each with an archive synology of 24Tb - we are a different league to you. Since i imagine 365 costs the same per user then I imagine you can leverage the higher storage capacities on offer whereas I dont need that. My system is far simpler than yours, hence a less likely occurrence of an issue. I suppose there is no middle ground with 365 - for highly complicated high volume systems then yes, 365 is better as you don't need to worry about setting a complex HA DAG system onsite and at 2PB of data, that would take a large management of storage on its own. At the other end of the scale, for smaller users then you wont need the added hardware for exchange in the first place. If you are somewhere inbetween then it is down to the individuals to evaluate.

Edited November 19, 2018 by KK20

[chaplic]

There's an element of 'religion' with this sort of stuff, its a bit like mac vs pc, ST vs Amiga, Netware Vs Windows, MP3 vs CD. So people take a position based on one thing (job security, sexiest new tech?) then hang any other reason off of it.

 

I see both ends of the spectrum as I do very large o365 deployments but also look after a couple of small setups. The large deployments are actively looking to move all tech into the cloud (so get rid of Exchange hybrid, ADFS) because that tends to be where availability problems lie. Some of the cloud-only offers are also very strong (Conditional Access, Teams, even onedrive these days). Also, the incremental updates rather than big upheavals every few years is notionally better, though it's tricky to sort out if your IT operation is outsourced. To fully exploit the 'new stuff' in o365 it's probably easier for IT to be in house.

 

Curiously, the MFA outage yesterday was met with little complaint by non-IT users, once they knew it was a massive "Microsoft thing" and out of the hands of us mere mortals.

 

At my school, the "email server" was 10 POP mailboxes that came free with web hosting, in total there was 100MB of space (it would fill up over summer holidays). There was not enough tin, and certainly not enough skill, to run Exchange in-house. So O365 is an absoloute game-changer in terms of end user experience, and other than a cusory glance every so often, I've not touched it since I set it up, a teacher who is a pc gamer looks after it.

 

Do I worry that I'm 'doing myself out of a job' ? absoloutley not. Our customers dont care abou DAGs, if the server is down the hall or across the continent. We are only there to help them get the job done. So, whilst a CD is better than an MP3 player in many respects, turns out MP3 player is 'good enough' and today the most successful option.

Edited November 20, 2018 by chaplic

[_techie_]

I am in a similar position to ITGURU here.... but having moved away from LA based Internet provision to an external supplier (EXA) with a direct connection, cloud services are now a real possibility. I can see where a number of points from both sides, and we use internal email hugely more than external email... and losing your internet connection (if going fully O365) would be bad news for heavy users of internal mail!

However with EXA we do have a backup ADSL link that could be used for basic services, that falls over automatically so everyone going to O365 probably wouldn't cause that much of an issue. We also have SLA with EXA for under 1 hour downtime or compensation would be due to ourselves. So far we have only had 1 outage and was resumed in under 1 hour in 18 months of the agreement.

 

Currently we have just provided mailboxes to all students, even after raising it as discussion points for the past few years as a necessary need to educate students in the appropriate use of email, along with a move away from Moodle to Google Classroom as our choice of online learning platform. For me, the biggest change to moving to cloud services, was the reliability/failover/support of our broadband speed and reliability, as well as control and monitoring over the firewall. Moving away from LA Broadband was the first step in going more cloud based.

 

Our next stop is moving to a hybrid spam filtering through Exchange Online Protection as a first step, possibly moving student email boxes over to O365 (without the need for backing them up). We may also move archive mailboxes for staff to O365 as well.

I feel quite uneasy with moving to O365 fully just yet, without some kind of provision for backing up of staff mailboxes (especially finance and admin teams, and SLT). We use VEEAM for backups and whilst this is great with on-prem exchange currently, the costs to buy O365 backup for VEEAM is cost-prohibitive as of yet (yes thank you UK GOV)... as we would need to buy additional licenses to facilitate this. We have purchased Exchange 2013 a few years ago so not a massive cost.

 

If the user experience is currently better with on-prem for ITGURU, he is probably better to do this for now, until he sorts his LA/Broadband provision out, as well as the possible backup issues (which maybe a policy/requirement of his school)...

I would agree with Michael's post and KK20 too. Solve your internet latency issue first, this seems to be causing the biggest issue. You may also save cash too, as moving to EXA Saved us significantly over the LA over a 5 year period.

 

Our current issue with downtime really exists around the potential power failure/power cut scenario as this then means that all computers, and services are out of use (kind of balances itself out if you think about it!).

 

I'll let you know how I progress with EOP implementation, currently about to move MX records during the Xmas break! Wish me luck...

[djm968]

O365 (Free) + Full Fat Outlook client = local PST (for backup) + no exchange server required! Absolute no brainer!

[ITGURU]

O365 (Free) + Full Fat Outlook client = local PST (for backup) + no exchange server required! Absolute no brainer!

 

And when you lose internet (and no redundant connection) how do you send and receive internal mail? Rare I need to look back on old emails. I need current.

[3s-gtech]

I know that documentation will be limited, but I imagine that building an onsite Exchange server to work as as part of hybrid should work. It won't change your mailbox locations, but I can't see why you couldn't move these across either way, just like if you have two Exchange DBs. Would be interested to see your experiences on this. We're still onsite only, but I would just go O365 only if doing this simply for simplicity. Exchange has given me some major headaches over the last few weeks and I wouldn't miss it too much!

[djm968]

And when you lose internet (and no redundant connection) how do you send and receive internal mail? Rare I need to look back on old emails. I need current.

 

Most Schools that I have worked for/with would be more concerned about loosing other services that depend on the Internet connection if it went down, Internal email would be low on the list of these priority services.

[ITGURU]

Most Schools that I have worked for/with would be more concerned about loosing other services that depend on the Internet connection if it went down, Internal email would be low on the list of these priority services.

 

what about safeguarding. you have instant notification software to get messages to people?

[2ilent8cho]

Most Schools that I have worked for/with would be more concerned about loosing other services that depend on the Internet connection if it went down, Internal email would be low on the list of these priority services.

 

Our Head Teacher would have a fit if email stopped working, our whole school runs on it, all messages are delivered this way. Are the schools you have worked for still printing 1 memo, photocopying it 60 times then putting it in everyones pigeon hole?

[djm968]

what about safeguarding. you have instant notification software to get messages to people?

Why not? Messaging solutions are availbe if the School really feels that the is the best way to communicate a safeguarding issues to staff!

[djm968]

Our Head Teacher would have a fit if email stopped working, our whole school runs on it, all messages are delivered this way. Are the schools you have worked for still printing 1 memo, photocopying it 60 times then putting it in everyones pigeon hole?

 

Wasn’t going to reply to this, but all of the Schools I have worked with, have realistic ICT service delivery expectations and these expectations require competent management.

[Wubbalubbadub]

what about safeguarding. you have instant notification software to get messages to people?

Yeah, phones.

[DrCheese]

what about safeguarding. you have instant notification software to get messages to people?

 

Yes, Netsupport Notify. It costs next to nothing & comes up in front of everything that person is doing & can be tracked that a person's read it.

 

I used to be heavily against moving to the cloud but moving to 365 was the *best* thing I've ever done. Exchange updates were a slow pain in the ass & migrating to new versions required a fresh install & a migration per server - I had two fairly major issues with exchange during my time running it from 2007 to 2015 that required me to stay up most of the night fixing it so the next day I didn't get staff going nuts.

 

I still have a lot of management to do for 365, but I can focus on pushing improvements & offering other services to users, rather than faffing about with the infrastructure. If you sit stuck in the mud and say "I'm not doing this because I'll be out of a job", you'll be out of a job anyway before too long.

[ilc72]

I can see both points of view, having my first experience with email was MS Mail 4.0 and Lotus ccMail!

 

My background was Enterprise email and communications and the largest ever deployment was 240K users across 400+ worldwide offices, including some in some very far flung places. Back in those days, 2003, Exchange wasn’t an option and Lotus Notes was the only realistic option. That deployment consolidated from 46 datacenters to just 3 mirrored datacenter sites, it ran on highly virtualised Unix servers, though we evaluated platforms from x86 to the mainframe.

 

I’m no lover of Exchange and spent many years battling Microsoft in the trenches.

 

However, these days I love Office 365 and think that the implementation is fantastic, I would never recommend a School try and maintain an on premise solution, that said if you have the skills to run it it is still a viable solution. But ITGURU’s employers are lucky to have such a skilled and knowledgeable person in their School, but what if ITGURU retires, if off sick, or is run over by the metaphorical bus! Certainly down in the South East trying to recruit skilled staff at rates Schools are willing to pay makes the decision to Office 365 an easy one.

 

I’ve only recently got involved in the Education sector as a Co-Opted Governor, despite wanting to do anything but IT, the disaster that my School’s IT has become I have had to become involved. What I know is that the School has an IT infrastructure that is too complicated, especially given its ability to compete suitably skilled for IT support resources, we have no choice to simplify things.

 

One of the first projects is to migrate Staff email to O365, we just need to figure out how the user management integrate with the current W7 environment, most probably ADFS if it can deliver self-service.

 

Another point that’s oft overlooked is how strong Office 365 security is when opening up BYOD, think multi-factor authentication on setup on new devices, automatic URL rewriting, device management, remote wipe, etc..

[ITGURU]

I can see both points of view, having my first experience with email was MS Mail 4.0 and Lotus ccMail!

 

My background was Enterprise email and communications and the largest ever deployment was 240K users across 400+ worldwide offices, including some in some very far flung places. Back in those days, 2003, Exchange wasn’t an option and Lotus Notes was the only realistic option. That deployment consolidated from 46 datacenters to just 3 mirrored datacenter sites, it ran on highly virtualised Unix servers, though we evaluated platforms from x86 to the mainframe.

 

I’m no lover of Exchange and spent many years battling Microsoft in the trenches.

 

However, these days I love Office 365 and think that the implementation is fantastic, I would never recommend a School try and maintain an on premise solution, that said if you have the skills to run it it is still a viable solution. But ITGURU’s employers are lucky to have such a skilled and knowledgeable person in their School, but what if ITGURU retires, if off sick, or is run over by the metaphorical bus! Certainly down in the South East trying to recruit skilled staff at rates Schools are willing to pay makes the decision to Office 365 an easy one.

 

I’ve only recently got involved in the Education sector as a Co-Opted Governor, despite wanting to do anything but IT, the disaster that my School’s IT has become I have had to become involved. What I know is that the School has an IT infrastructure that is too complicated, especially given its ability to compete suitably skilled for IT support resources, we have no choice to simplify things.

 

One of the first projects is to migrate Staff email to O365, we just need to figure out how the user management integrate with the current W7 environment, most probably ADFS if it can deliver self-service.

 

Another point that’s oft overlooked is how strong Office 365 security is when opening up BYOD, think multi-factor authentication on setup on new devices, automatic URL rewriting, device management, remote wipe, etc..

It's the question they ask about being hit down by a bus several.times...there are procedures in place and there is nothing on site that can't run a month or month infrastructure wise without an issue and gives them time to find a suitable replacement. I've had 100% uptime on exchange for months. to be honest what's the difference between local exchange and 365 exchange admin centre.

they are lucky as come to me for advice and saved schools money . whilst yes I could be hit by a bus whilst I'm in the job I do what I do but obviously if I wasn't able to prove my skills then there's not much point in me being in a job I love and been there for 16 years. if it all went to the cloud then there would be no need for my skills where I've saved a managed school with external support thousands. ultimately there are pros and cons to everything. if an external service goes down it's so frustrating you can't fix it whereas on site I can provide an immediate fix.

[ilc72]

It's the question they ask about being hit down by a bus several.times...there are procedures in place and there is nothing on site that can't run a month or month infrastructure wise without an issue and gives them time to find a suitable replacement. I've had 100% uptime on exchange for months. to be honest what's the difference between local exchange and 365 exchange admin centre.

they are lucky as come to me for advice and saved schools money . whilst yes I could be hit by a bus whilst I'm in the job I do what I do but obviously if I wasn't able to prove my skills then there's not much point in me being in a job I love and been there for 16 years. if it all went to the cloud then there would be no need for my skills where I've saved a managed school with external support thousands. ultimately there are pros and cons to everything. if an external service goes down it's so frustrating you can't fix it whereas on site I can provide an immediate fix.

 

ITGURU

 

I don’t question your logic, I commend your service to the School and you’ve given good reasons as to your reasoning. There is no one size fits all solution or product. The best products are useless unless they have the right people with the right skills installing and managing them!

 

My comments were actually meant as a compliment not as criticism. I’m even more impressed that everything is properly documented, often the weakness of many IT professionals who are happy to carry it in their heads. I just hope the School appreciates you and pays you well, as they have a gem!

[mavhc]

Seems like your main problem is your internet connection is terrible, how much will it cost to get fiber installed?

[AlanD]

Speaking as someone who hung on to running a local exchange server...partly because I couldn't get answers about speeds and response times that providers were willing to promise...and partly because we wanted backups that were genuine backups....I find this thread providing some food for thought. I tend to agree - that there are probably more pros than cons...with moving to office 365...but I do think you need to go into it with your eyes open. I'm not convinced that going "backwards" and deploying a local exchange hybrid server would necessarily give you any benefit - because either mailboxes will still be off site...and so still prevent email working in the event of external internet failure...or mailboxes are internal...in which case - external access would be impossible in the event of failure. And such a hybrid solution wouldn't be easy to backup either.

 

I would be concerned if sending bulk emails took 4 hours with only one going every three seconds...but having said that...perhaps they go quite slowly with a hosted exchange too...its just that control returns to the user almost immediately giving you the illusion that they have been sent...when it reality your exchange server is still sending them for the next hour...4 hours does seem painfully slow though...so I'm wondering about the size of the internet pipe and the size of the emails and attachments. (We strictly limit attachment size - much to everyone's annoyance....but the reality is that email was never designed to send large amounts of identical content to students or parents...or staff....and is much better done by uploading the content to a public server and providing a link in the email. We have a template so do this which we regularly have to remind staff about...because they think they can just attach anything and send it. No one...want emails with large attachments arriving in their email box - especially with mobile phones when you can use up their complete data allowance in a single email!)

[DrCheese]

if it all went to the cloud then there would be no need for my skills

Honestly that's a load of rubbish - That my exchange is in the cloud now doesn't mean my skills aren't needed - There's a ton of admin tasks that still need highly skilled support to do & you'll always need to run/configure the actual infrastructure (Configuration/Networking/Devices) to access all these services in the way that staff/students expect.

 

Anyone could sign up for say Google Apps for education, but setting it up/running it properly in a way that benefits the school requires skilled support. I've seen a few primaries try to go it alone and it ends up a total mess, with data leaking all over the place & terrible/hap hazard management that means they aren't getting the best from it.

 

where I've saved a managed school with external support thousands

Again, going to cloud doesn't mean getting external support in to replace you.

 

You can not simply stick your head in the sand and refuse to move with the times because you love how things are right now. Given school budgets are the way they are, they won't be able to justify the costs of running their own highly available on site services when cheap alternatives exist in the cloud & usually freely bundled in with your existing licenses. I doubt any of us could offer 50GB email storage to each member of staff/students & 1TB of disk space, whist having it fully backed up with high availablity without totally blowing the entire school budget. But this is what users will expect.

 

 

if an external service goes down it's so frustrating you can't fix it whereas on site I can provide an immediate fix.

Can you tho & ultimately, do you really want that stress? Depending on what has occured, it may be a fix that takes a lot longer to resolve & it's often all down to just you, with all the weight of the school on you & management breathing down your neck. As I said before, I had 2 fairly major exchange outages between 2007/2015 when I ran it & whist I was confident in my abilities to restore it (and I did) I really didn't enjoy the stress of it. I've also had one fairly major file server corruption issue during my time as well that took longer than I wanted to resolve & it was not a fun few days.

 

You simply don't have the level of resources in personel & money that a large company like Microsoft do. If a major outage occurs they can throw resources at it until it's fixed.

 

You just need to build in contingency plans to manage if certain services in the cloud fail & test them frequently (Again, this is another reason your skills will still be required)

[ITGURU]

Honestly that's a load of rubbish - That my exchange is in the cloud now doesn't mean my skills aren't needed - There's a ton of admin tasks that still need highly skilled support to do & you'll always need to run/configure the actual infrastructure (Configuration/Networking/Devices) to access all these services in the way that staff/students expect.

 

Anyone could sign up for say Google Apps for education, but setting it up/running it properly in a way that benefits the school requires skilled support. I've seen a few primaries try to go it alone and it ends up a total mess, with data leaking all over the place & terrible/hap hazard management that means they aren't getting the best from it.

 

 

Again, going to cloud doesn't mean getting external support in to replace you.

 

You can not simply stick your head in the sand and refuse to move with the times because you love how things are right now. Given school budgets are the way they are, they won't be able to justify the costs of running their own highly available on site services when cheap alternatives exist in the cloud & usually freely bundled in with your existing licenses. I doubt any of us could offer 50GB email storage to each member of staff/students & 1TB of disk space, whist having it fully backed up with high availablity without totally blowing the entire school budget. But this is what users will expect.

 

 

 

Can you tho & ultimately, do you really want that stress? Depending on what has occured, it may be a fix that takes a lot longer to resolve & it's often all down to just you, with all the weight of the school on you & management breathing down your neck. As I said before, I had 2 fairly major exchange outages between 2007/2015 when I ran it & whist I was confident in my abilities to restore it (and I did) I really didn't enjoy the stress of it. I've also had one fairly major file server corruption issue during my time as well that took longer than I wanted to resolve & it was not a fun few days.

 

You simply don't have the level of resources in personel & money that a large company like Microsoft do. If a major outage occurs they can throw resources at it until it's fixed.

 

You just need to build in contingency plans to manage if certain services in the cloud fail & test them frequently (Again, this is another reason your skills will still be required)

I actually find it more frustrating and stressful when external systems go down and I cannot resolve them. I take pride in my job and if any system managed externally isn't working I get more frustrated than if an internal issue

[mb2k01]

@ITGURU I had an almost identical stance a few years ago. I'd always managed a local Exchange server in my environments (well, from Exchange 2000 anyway) and had said most of what you have here in terms of being able to manage locally, having true control over it etc.

I actually started my 365 journey as a hybrid setup, where I was still leveraging my internal Exchange server for mail, but utilising the rest of the 365 estate for collaboration and productivity.

It got to a point where, other than a mind-shift and policy change on the backup / restoration front, it made perfect sense to migrate mailboxes to the cloud.

 

Your argument of 'what happens if the internet connection goes down' was also one I used to use. Of course, you're right - it is a consideration and would have an impact. However, the fact that if it was to go down you lose all access to your email if it was run locally would arguably extend the severity of the issue. With mailboxes in 365 I know that if I have a local connection issue I and my users can still use our personal / work-assigned devices via 4G or other internet connection to still connect to our mail.

During service time this might not be too much of a concern, especially if it was just a blip, but think holiday periods etc. Have you never wanted to quickly down something on site when you've had the flexibility to do it, but been worried that the Head or someone else might be using the Exchange server while they are sat at home / on the beach?

 

When I was in that role and made the change, I never really looked back. It freed me up to be able to concentrate in other areas, knowing that there wasn't that part of the server estate to manage locally any more.

The move encouraged me, and my users, to make even more use of the rest of 365 too. OneDrive / SharePoint in particular - which has knock-on positive effects in terms of data having to be stored and backed up locally etc. Old style NTFS 'Shared Areas' are gradually phasing out too, meaning documents are available when and where people need them without the need for things like Remote Access or other 3rd party products.

[mavhc]

Your employer gets to decide where they're spending your time. Given that O365 is free, and Exchange + your time isn't...

 

How often does your internet go down?