El Reg drills into Office 365: What's under the hood? Microsoft's cloudy services offering have had an overhaul. Office 365 is faster, stronger, smarter, better and more like TIFKAM (the interface formerly known as Metro), or Modern User as it is now called, than ever before. The new overhaul is a major upgrade in usability and administer ability. Let's take a peek under the hood …
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That allows for 8h+ downtime, which is a whole business day. Some businesses can cope with this. But Office in the staple diet of a lot of IT dependent businesses, having this potential level scale of downtime with no recourse is simply not an option. If we had 100 staff, that could effectively leads to the of 100 days worth of many hours.
But like I said, (que Borat) its nice!
But is 99.99% an option? Could you afford to put a second PC on every desk just to meet the uptime requirements? I don't know of any Enterprise that runs a 99.9% uptime desktop environment (server side perhaps, and perhaps a few key users, but not the entire desktop).
Taking your 100 staff as an example, how many of them suffer a single day outage spread across the year? They don't all break at once, but in most large enterprises I've seen you wait several hours before the break-fix engineer gets to you to rebuild the failed PC, and another hour for the rebuild. (yes, there are a few slick admins out there, but as the article says, most aren't).
Balance the cost against the risk. What if the 8 hour outage happens in the middle of the night? You win.
You don't need a 2nd PC for everyone, just a spare "standard image" and enforce users on network drives.
Then you need a 2nd backup/synchronised server to cope with the primary failing, and a spare network switch.
Having said all of that, my biggest issue with Office365 is the placing of all your data unencrypted in the hands of a USA company. If you are a Ma & Pa shop selling cookies and stuff no problem, but not if you have any IP worth speaking of. And in particular work with clients that have restrictions (defence, medical, financial, etc).
"but not if you have any IP worth speaking of. And in particular work with clients that have restrictions (defence, medical, financial, etc)." Not necessarily so.
For the general user or business, MS complies with EU privacy law requirements (and is the only cloudy service to do so as of this writing) which is good 'nuff.
My role is in IT, but everything I touch has IP and related issues that must are managed daily. (Must this digital asset reside within a specific geographical location, does this service expose permanent establishment risk, Art. 29 EU Model contract clauses, etc.) And no, I'm not a lawyer, I just participate in far too many discussions with legal counsel. ;)
As for the rest, if your'e dealing with intellectual property, defence, medical (Bio-tech anyone?) etc. then you'll have a serious legal resource unit to get the appropriate level of indemnity, IP protection, bespoke clauses, etc., to either make the solution worthwhile, or you'll walk away. It's not an issue.
Further, was just browsing the link to the offerings
"Financially-backed 99.9% up-time guarantee:
Peace of mind that your services are available with an industry-leading, financially-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee."
FINANCIALLY BACKED. Now I haven't actually downloaded the full T&Cs, but that sounds like recourse to me. And there may also be tighter conditions on RTO for single incidents, with the aggregate being 8 hours (but as I say, I haven't looked, but then neither did you).
I think the point is that for most places who don't demand 99.9% connectivity anyway (and wouldn't understand what it really means it if they did), their Internet connection is going to be vastly less than that. Even getting any sort of SLA basically means leased-line.
Not every company is some huge conglomerate with a thousand desktops. The people being pitched at here also include tiny little outfits where dangling off their local BT business connection is going to cost them more downtime than anything Microsoft (or Google, or anyone else) could throw at them. The question top of my mind is "what happens when I go offline unexpectedly", not "what happens if THEY go offline unexpectedly".
And financial compensation is probably not going to be one tenth of one percent of what being without Office - site-wide - will cost you for a day a year, if you're a business that actually uses it to do business. Hell, just a day without email could cost you more than you pay on software and IT in a year if it means you lose a customer (or fail to gain that customer in the first place).
You should check out the sla. The three nines is for service availability. If you get less than three nines you get some amount of free service. At no point do you get a refund.
Also, note the service availability fact. There is no SLA around data availability.
Be wary if you have been using public folders in your organisation. In Exchange online (and Exchange 2013) public folders are still there, but the management and internal structure has changed significantly. The public folder is now based on a mailbox. The IPM sub-tree and management thereof is now naturally seen as normal mailboxes, this also means that the multi master model seen in previous versions have changed to a single master version.
I fully understand, and appreciate, that for most orgs this is not going to be a show stopper, but keep this in mind when you are planning your migrations.
It seems as if MS have not given up the fight against the humble public folder. :-)
"Office 365 subscribers gain access to Office Web Apps. These are in-browser variants of the installable Office applications. Currently supported are Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote."
Yet guess what? I'm not a 365 subscriber but an Office 2010 user and I also got access to the Office web apps. Thing is; everyone who has a Microsoft ID can get access to their free e-mail services (the service formerly known as Hotmail) but also to their web applications. And considering how "low level" plans of Office 365 focus themselves on the web applications one has to wonder what the extra value is on those plans.
I think you made a very good analysis so far, Office 365 isn't cheap in comparison but its been my experience that it also doesn't take away the need for support of some sort (depending on the company and chosen plan of course). Something Microsoft also seems to acknowledge because some plans come with specific 24/7 phone support. They wouldn't roll that in without a good reason...
And although I also agree with regards to Lync as being a good means of communication, there is something many people / companies tend to overlook: if you already have a license for a Windows 2008 or 2013 server you also gain the right to use Sharepoint (link to Office Sharepoint website) on that server, the 'free' Foundation version to be precise. (this even applies to Server 2003, but that's a bit dated).
Although its main focus is aimed at websites these days one of its features is allowing so called "workspaces" to be build which can be used by a variety of users. If you then pick up the freely available Sharepoint workspace (link to Office Sharepoint Workspace page) you can achieve something somewhat comparable to what you'd get with Lync.
Which addresses a completely different aspect by itself: the information given to you by Microsoft these days is somewhat "tainted". They try everything to persuade you to start a subscription while in fact you may have other, more cheaper, alternatives available. Even while you may not realize it yet. But information on those options is more than often sparse to say the least...
Alas, nice article and I'm very anxious to read your findings.
Oh; please do share which subscription you got or are evaluating...
I've evaluated about 8 different levels of subscription. Most of the articles you'll read are Enterprise E3 based subscriptions, simply because when you spin up a trial that's the version you get. If you have questions about other subscription levels, let'er rip; I've probably used them at some point...
The free Sharepoint (previously WSS - Windows Sharepoint Services) is to Sharepoint Server as PSP is to PS3. It's got part of the same name and some features are similar, but for heavy lifting you need a correctly sized and scaled out server farm.
Sharepoint foundation has its place, and for a single server webserver deployment it's fine. The additional features available in Sharepoint Server for collaboration are worth evaluating.
I disagree that workspace is a good substitute for Lync, I think you've missed what Lync is about - it's not just an IM and content sharing client. Horses for courses, or, you need to pick the right tool for the job. Just because you CAN do something with a tool doesn't make it the right one to choose. I wouldn't manage my asset database in Excel just because it formats it nicely with pretty colours.
Overall, it seems to be OK. At least the Exchange Online part that I deal with. I haven't yet played with the actual "Office" stuff or Skydrive, as I just can't force myself to give-a-damn (who needs more than Notepad++ provides, anyhow???).
My biggest beef so far is that MS is splitting each Live@EDU account into two accounts - one for Exchange Online (which I can administer), the other for Skydrive/Office (which only Microsoft administers). I'm not terribly fond of that, as my users (college students) are very prone to forgetting passwords, and I'll hate to tell them they have to talk to Microsoft if they save their term paper in Skydrive and forget their password. I've pretty much suggested to my students that they avoid using anything but email. Hey, it's free, so it's not like we're wasting any money on excess licenses.
My other big beef is that Microsoft's documentation on the (forced) migration from Live@EDU -> O365 is utter rubbish. Confusing it is and none of the local MS-sales weasels seem to have answers for any of the deeper questions about how it's going to work and what the actual requirements are.
But hey, it's all free for us (as a University), so I try not to complain too bitterly. Not that I don't often wish I'd moved us to Google's Education stuff three years ago instead of Microsoft. Maybe that wasn't my best decision after all...
Good luck with the move Dave. I did a number of custom Live@edu deployments over the years that are being revisited now to upgrade to Office 365. I did a number of uplifts between versions of Live@edu too which were always challenging to coordinate the backend upgrade with the client side/identity sync changes. I do think the documentation they have is limited, but there are a few of us here in the UK who can help.
Free plug for one of my competitors/collaborators who are running training for administrators for this process on the 21st of May: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukeducloud/archive/2013/04/16/partner-offering-live-edu-upgrade-training.aspx
Thanks, but it's all over now. Was really a non-event, in spite of all of the hype and hoopla coming out of MS about the "upgrade". The biggest problem has been getting word out to the students that the URL for webmail isn't www.live.com anymore. Other than that, it did require some major twiddling (and pondering) to my powershell script that creates accounts, but nothing show stopping.
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
It'll get in one day...
E-mail is an inherently unsecured and unencrypted messaging system not to be used to transfer or store sensitive information
.. unless extra measures are taken. We managed just fine, but we did a lot of prep work (and no, we did not add extra crypto, there are other ways).
Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft products.
Sadly this is quite true in the "business" world. It really doesn't matter what the costs are, a big company like Microsoft is considered infallible. They keep adding features to products and convince suckers (aka customers) that the product is necessary, even if they really don't need the latest upgrade. This cycle persists with every new release of Office/Windows.
One of these days, LibreOffice will have a NEW valuable feature that will catch the attention of an IT CTO or something "C" similar, and then they will latch onto it as being cool necessary to do their business functions. Microsoft will, of course, implement it in an incompatible way, but if there is enough delay between the "open" implementation and the Microsoft (closed) implementation that the "business world" takes notice, it might turn the tide. Until then all I can do is call the BSA hotline and complain that my software (Linux/LibreOffice) doesn't have a license key, and it is copied all over the place, just to see what they do.
Life goes on (*SIGH*).
This whole Office/Exchange - 365 thing is going around in circles.
I was contracted in recently by two separate small companies (80 approx. staff), to move them back from Office 365 to their own AD & Exchange servers in-house. At the request of their directors.
The main reason from both of them. Was "Performance". Office 365 was just too slow, especially with large mailboxes. And also complaining of Spreadsheets that there were unusable.
One of my clients was also re-assured by the sales team that sold them Office 365, that their data would be stored within the UK. But simple traces showed it was actually being stored at a MS Datacenter in the NY area, USA.
As a contract Field Engineer, and speaking to lots of Clients, or rather them talking to me about their experiences with 365 from their perspective. I see it all going full-circle in the very near future.
Paris: Because she likes going in circles.
My experience is that there are multiple compatibility issues between Office 2013 and Office 365. Can anyone else with experience comment on compatibility please.
I think you meant:
My experience is that there are multiple compatibility issues between Office X and Office Y. Can anyone else with experience comment on compatibility please.
Replace X and Y with any versions you want.
Computer says "NO".
Office 365 using ODF and other open standards?
End to end SSL across all apps.
A MAC code so one can easily shift to another provider should MS up the ante?
Computer says "Maybe"
Regardless of QoS and the level of service offerings, being locked in to one provider and their proprietary formats should cause concern for any CIO/CFO.
I'd love to see the IT setup of wherever he works. The mind boggles. Surely it must be the perfect example?
Maybe Eadon should invite the Reg to come visit his workplace and give a full interview as to how it all works?
You know "Linux done right in the Workplace - SUCCESS"
That's if he's actually left school yet or not posting from a clinic somewhere.
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