Soulfish

It's the classic risk vs cost. From our (a large enterprise) perspective we're unable to backup our content; there's too much of it already and our growth rates are insane. However, we've accepted that Microsoft's existing capabilities and the backup that is provided as part of our contract are both suitable and meet our RPO and RTO. And unlike a lot of customers we've seen this in practice: we've had entire segments of our Exchange Online infrastructure go offline and seamlessly failover to another datacenter, we've restored data from OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint (in the many PBs range in a single go previously) and our blanket legal-hold/retention policy ensures that even if an email is accidentally deleted it's recoverable for many years (until our hard deletion policies purge it at least!). At the SME side, I've supported (and continue to support) a handful of family/friends that have tenants with at most a handful of users and we still don't back those up. I could be convinced that there may be a usecase for a very small number of very important VIP users where you want multiple layers of protection for their data, but for the general case for 99.99999% of users I'm happy to rely on the service and the built in tools.

I'm in the enterprise space now and we do an O365 tenant-to-tenant migration every few weeks (anything from a handful of users to 15k+) that we run inhouse. Our tool of choice is BitTitan MigrationWiz for Mailbox/Archive and Teams migrations; Mover.io for OneDrive migrations (free) and ShareGate for SharePoint migrations. The MS SharePoint migration tools are OK depending on the complexity of the SharePoint migration (but generally fine for basic stuff) and the MS Exchange tenant-to-tenant migration stuff is also pretty good these days; we just like the additional functionality that MigrationWiz provides.

At an enterprise level I haven't met a large-scale customer (50k+ seats) that backs up O365. We utilise retention policies and legal holds where required and it satisfies both our internal "backup" requirements and all of our legal + compliance requirements. What's the requirement driving offsite backup of O365?

Teams meeting rooms are my bread and butter these days . The first question is how large is the room, and how many people are you looking at having in the room. Teams will take care of all audio mixing if you used an approved meeting room - you don't need specialist audio mixing or anything like that. An out-of-the-box "Teams Meeting Room" by Logitech, Poly, HP or Lenovo will handle it all for you. Teams meeting rooms are quite nice in that they are essentially all in one devices based either around a kiosk Windows PC or an Android device. For simplicity's sake, you can look at something like a Logitech Rally Bar with a Logitech TAP touchscreen, or for an Android-based solution the Poly Studio X50 with TC8. I've got both devices in rooms that can take up to 10 people and they work pretty well. If you want a larger room then you're looking at something like the Logitech Rally Plus, where you end up with a separate webcam, speakers, mics that are all connected back to the Windows PC. We use those in rooms that are anywhere from 8 person up to 40-50 person. Larger than that is possible for Teams, but at that size you need a bespoke solution (we have Teams meeting rooms connected to multiple auditoriums that can seat 500-1000, but then you're looking at ££££££)

So the short answer is this isn't possible in SharePoint Online. You are limited to two managed paths within SharePoint Online: tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/ and tenant.sharepoint.com/teams/ So you could create separate SharePoint sites under one of those for each school i.e. tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/school1 tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/school2 tenant.sharepoint.com/sites/school3

Too many zero-day vulnerabilities, plus the original privacy policy was causing significant issues for our business. There's also the fact that we have quite a stringent approval mechanism for any new software (everything goes through an independent set of pen tests and security review) that this hadn't gone through. We've totally taken the view that there are business requirements to use Zoom for third party conferences, but we have a very well developed Teams deployment (we do over 10 million minutes of conferencing a month through it) but the windows client as it stands is too much of a risk for us to allow. We continually review these things so if things improve and our third-party security assessments give it a clean bill of health we'll approve it again. Just not for our users hosting meetings through it!

So, working in a huge-multinational our Cyber Security teams have now rated Zoom "High Risk", and as such we're in the process of blocking access for the app and preventing sign up using corporate email. Users can only join a Zoom meeting if its been created by a third party (customer, supplier or similar) and only through Chrome. Zoom isn't an approved corporate application for us, and given we have Teams deployed for all users globally (together with Audio + Video conferencing options) there isn't a lot of reason to not steer users away from it.

Yes, that's certainly a consideration! We're big enough that we tend to deal directly with the various MS Product Groups when we have an issue and bypass a lot of "normal" support channels. Although I do also run O365 tenants that are tiny and have had MS restore stuff in a timely manner (in line with their published SLAs). Ultimately I think its a case of what can you live without while MS support carry out a restore vs the absolute critical stuff that you need. That supercritical stuff look at potential having somewhere else as a safeguard, depending on your risk appetite/cost appetite.

So coming at this from a slightly different angle (I'm responsible for O365 for a large-multinational where downtime is measured in $millions/minute), but we don't backup O365. At all. MS provides two weeks of backups if required (and yes we've had them restore roughly 0.5PB before) within SharePoint/OneDrive and Exchange is an active-active failover between multiple datacenters in different countries. For us it's just not feasible or sensible to backup O365. We physically couldn't extract data fast enough, and the costs to store the backups for the amount of data we have in O365 just don't make sense. We carried out the risk assessment when we moved to O365 that ultimately what we were getting from MS was better than we could provide ourselves and met our business requirements.

Same - I've been asking them for an EU DC since I first signed up in 2008

That's a huge inconvenience, especially after just getting used to using Android Pay for transactions up to £100 rather than the £30 contactless limit!

That was a restore of our OneDrive environment; lets just say malware and if anyone is at BETT feel free to ask me about it

Totally agree with what @Roberto and @chaplic are saying. Running a massive O365 implementation we have PBs of email, archives and SharePoint data - there's no way we could ever hope to backup any of it. Unlike most organisations we have had Microsoft restore over 0.5pb in under 12 hours so we're pretty happy with the SLAs that we have in place with them

So decided that since I had this shiny thing to play with I may as well buy BF5 so had a play of that on single player + multiplayer, and for me it was perfect. Wouldn't have been able to tell it wasn't a local machine and playing everything at Ultra was great Just trying to get the extra 1tb storage but it keeps erroring everytime I try and add it

Happy new year everyone!

Well I got activated in the early hours of this morning, however being slightly drunk didn't get around to logging in until now Just setting things up and installing a few games. Haven't tried anything for the past few years knowing my rig wasn't really up to it so now having a think what to give a try! Appears my machine is a GTX 1080/E5-2678 v3 (2.5ghz) at the moment.

So for £9.99 I couldn’t say no, so I’ve taken the plunge to give it a try. Really interested to see how well it works as it’ll save me having to worry about upgrading my gaming PC if it’s any good, and give me an excuse to downsize my massive beast to a nice ultrabook . Plus my work surface pro is now usable as a games machine when I’m travelling so its win win - provided it works as advertised!

This looks really interesting, think I may need to give it a try over Christmas as my gaming rig is in major need of updates and this is much cheaper!

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

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

I don't work in education anymore, but I'm responsible for all collaboration services (including email) at a large 90k user company with offices around the world and thought I'd chip in with my viewpoint. We run all email out of O365, and don't operate on-prem Exchange at all (not even a hybrid environment). We don't backup O365 - that's what our SLA with MS is for, and yes we have had them restore over 200TB of SharePoint data before. I trust MS to run our email (and collaboration) systems better then we ever could. When I was in education I pushed to migrate email to O365 - for me it's a no brainer given the lower costs and higher uptime that MS can achieve.

I've used M247 before to provide a gigabit connection with a secondary backup circuit. This was a few years ago but certainly didn't have any problems with them, and everything worked as expected. They have one of the larger private networks in the UK from what I remember.

Teams will auto-update in the same way the OneDrive client will. The problem with packaging the client is the sheer rate of updates you see with it, so it's almost out-of-date as soon as its been packaged!

Thanks! Shame I feel like death warmed up with a cold at the moment!!!

I've got a Steelcase Leap v2 (https://www.steelcase.com/products/office-chairs/leap/) and a RH Logic 400. The RH Logic is OK, but I find the arms quite uncomfortable; whereas I absolutely love the Steelcase Leap . As standard it doesn't come with a headrest, but there's an option to add that quite easily to the v2 model. Lots of refurbished models available on eBay a lot cheaper than new as well.