Office 365 pros (and cons) over Mdaemon on-prem email solution.

[kennysarmy]

As title.

 

What are the main pros and cons in migrating from an on-prem (MDaemon) email provision to the MS Office 365 cloud offering?

 

My on-prem is very stable, everyone knows how to use it and we're unaffected by internet outages when sending internal mail. It can also be access from anywhere like Office 365.

 

A good pro for Office 365 is the much bigger mail-box sizes available.

[fordea]

I think the main benefits of Office 365 for schools are what it provides in addition to email for no cost:

 

Pros:

 

• Users get 1TB of OneDrive storage each
  
• Web versions of the office suite which provide nice collaboration functionality
  
• Students can install the Office suite on up to five of their personal devices thanks to the student advantage program (you'll need to ask your Office reseller about how to do this)
  
• You may also be able to get the above for staff depending on your current Office licensing agreement
  
• You may be able to use device based activation to install Office 365 CTR at your school depending on your current Office licensing agreement. There's some good threads on Edugeek about setting this up
  
• Office 365 provides free email-encryption (requires a bit of setup)
  
• Access to SharePoint to create an intranet
  
• Since the GDPR has come in to effect Microsoft have made great advances in the data protection side of things. They've added lots of functionality to the Security & Compliance center within Office365 to help protect your organisations data.
  
• Having Office 365 logins for your students/staff opens up the potential for single-sign-on capabilities to a host of online services.
  
• Can enable two-factor authentication for your Office 365 logins
  

 

Cons:

 

• Office 365 uptime/availability is generally good but there's been a number of blips recently. Trying to explain to staff that there's nothing you can do to fix an issue and that it's in Microsoft's hands is always fun
  
• Not really a con in my book but certain things on the management side of Office 365 require some PowerShell knowledge which can be a bit daunting at first. Becomes extremely powerful though when you get to grips with it
  

 

 

If I can think of any more I'll add them in!

[Boredguy]

Pro - Free, always being updated, lots of other features like SharePoint/OneDrive, Stream etc

Con - If there is a major issue, you have to wait for MS to resolve, but so far in 6 years since migrating from MD we've not had an outage.

[Areku]

Id have to put down

Pro: you can have office 365 accounts but still have your mail delivered to your local server, that way you can gain a lot of the benefits of both solutions... its free.

[kennysarmy]

Thanks for the replies so far.

[Linfit]

We have used MDaemon here for years, but only ever for staff e-mail. We are familiar with it, its very easy to manage and very reliable.

Its running on a VM so we can increase storage as required and have done several times.

A significant proportion of our e-mail traffic is staff to staff so never goes off-site.

 

We also have been an Office365 school and now very much getting into Google.

The staff all have Google mail accounts as do pupils.

 

We like that the staff admin e-mails run on MDaemon are completely separate from the Google accounts, which staff use to communicate with pupils.

 

I know we could have another domain on our tenancy to achieve this, and I can see the simplification arguments of moving everything to a cloud based system, but my view is that if you have the kit already set up and you are happy with the current version, so are not paying maintenance costs, why change it for the sake of changing ?

 

I intend to leave ours in place until some other factor comes into play which makes making the change essential or gives significant extra benefits.

[kennysarmy]

We have used MDaemon here for years, but only ever for staff e-mail. We are familiar with it, its very easy to manage and very reliable.

Its running on a VM so we can increase storage as required and have done several times.

A significant proportion of our e-mail traffic is staff to staff so never goes off-site.

 

We also have been an Office365 school and now very much getting into Google.

The staff all have Google mail accounts as do pupils.

 

We like that the staff admin e-mails run on MDaemon are completely separate from the Google accounts, which staff use to communicate with pupils.

 

I know we could have another domain on our tenancy to achieve this, and I can see the simplification arguments of moving everything to a cloud based system, but my view is that if you have the kit already set up and you are happy with the current version, so are not paying maintenance costs, why change it for the sake of changing ?

 

I intend to leave ours in place until some other factor comes into play which makes making the change essential or gives significant extra benefits.

 

Thanks - you raise some interesting points. Food for thought. All our teaching staff, students and admin staff emails are all processed by Mdaemon - I think I prefer the option of keeping everything in one place, be that on-prem or cloud.

 

We are paying around £1,400 a year for Mdaemon licences for the product and Security Plus.

 

We're going to need the Office 365 single sign on bit setup here anyway for a new Firefly VLE and e-Praise system....seems like a good time to also make the leap to the MS Email solution.

[Linfit]

 

We are paying around £1,400 a year for Mdaemon licences for the product and Security Plus.

 

We're going to need the Office 365 single sign on bit setup here anyway for a new Firefly VLE and e-Praise system....seems like a good time to also make the leap to the MS Email solution.

 

Yeah, I think if we had the pupils on ours I would probably be wanting to go cloud, and if its part of implementing other changes and trying to get systems more integrated, then it makes sense to move everything, particularly if there is a direct cost saving as well.

[Boredguy]

The reason we moved from MD to O365 was the yearly cost to keep it up to date and secure. Office 365 (or gmail) at least has no cost implications.

 

If you have a OVS licence agreement, you should get the A1 Plus licences to take advantage of the C2R Office installs so you get more easy intergration with Office clients and 365 Sharepoint/Onedrive via the SSO.

The GDPR rules, and encryption options is also something that is worth thinking about.

[kennysarmy]

The reason we moved from MD to O365 was the yearly cost to keep it up to date and secure. Office 365 (or gmail) at least has no cost implications.

 

If you have a OVS licence agreement, you should get the A1 Plus licences to take advantage of the C2R Office installs so you get more easy intergration with Office clients and 365 Sharepoint/Onedrive via the SSO.

The GDPR rules, and encryption options is also something that is worth thinking about.

 

Hi,

 

Can I ask what method you used to migrate your mailboxes from MDeamon to O365?

 

Was it just a straighforward IMAP Migration method - in which case how did you reset all your MDaemon accounts to a known password?

 

or did you use something like: https://www.recoverytools.com/mdaemon/migrator/ and create PST files for each user and then upload these to each new O365 account?

 

Cheers

[Boredguy]

We used a straightforward IMAP migration (after ensuring we had the firewall ports opened up).

 

We requested staff provided us with their passwords for the migration as we would then set them to expired at the end of that holiday so they were only known for the few days we were doing the migrations.

 

We Synchronised the bulk of the e-mails before we updated the MX record, and then ran the sync again once it was done to ensure all e-mails had gotten to Office 365.

 

We asked staff to ensure they exported to CSV any contacts or Calendar information they wanted, which the vast majority did not do as they wanted a fresh start.

 

For students, we did not bother migrating their mailboxes over as there was no real need as they didn't have much content in them.

[kennysarmy]

We used a straightforward IMAP migration (after ensuring we had the firewall ports opened up).

 

We requested staff provided us with their passwords for the migration as we would then set them to expired at the end of that holiday so they were only known for the few days we were doing the migrations.

 

We Synchronised the bulk of the e-mails before we updated the MX record, and then ran the sync again once it was done to ensure all e-mails had gotten to Office 365.

 

We asked staff to ensure they exported to CSV any contacts or Calendar information they wanted, which the vast majority did not do as they wanted a fresh start.

 

For students, we did not bother migrating their mailboxes over as there was no real need as they didn't have much content in them.

 

Thank you.

 

Our plan is to edit the main USERLIST.DAT file to reset ALL passwords to something we know (Separate from their AD account) - then post migration they'll obviously use their AD logon to access O365.

 

I had n't considered not migrating all the students, but think I'll be met with opposition if we suggested - they've got quite small mailbox sizes (100Mb) so there won't be much to migrate compared to staff.