Insert wiggle room when moving from on-premise Exchange Server to Microsoft's hosted Exchange Office 365, because the unexpected can occur.
At the last TechEd, an Exchange admin described how her company had recently moved 300 mailboxes to Office 365, with the full support of Microsoft. She was told everything would go smoothly. However:
- There were problems with the migration of existing mailboxes. It took quite a bit longer than anticipated; also many users were very unhappy when they found out that not all of their old mailbox contents survived the transition
- She hit a major service outage
Microsoft offered reduced fees in compensation, but obviously that didn't make up for the disruption to business when the company's email was down for days.
Office 365 is an exciting new way to bring full Exchange capability to your organization without the hassle of managing Exchange on premise; but, as with most IT projects, it's worth planning for the unexpected.
Bob Spurzem -- In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Iron Mountain Digital Division, which was recently purchased by Autonomy.