Traditional vs. 365

[JLogan3o13]

I have a client that is considering Office 365. We're just beginning to look into the CBA for upgrading their desktop version (2007!) to 2013, or moving to 365. Just curious what others have experienced in a corporate environment with 365, and what business justifications you found for it over traditional volume licensing and the desktop model.

[iamtheky]

From the security dept. we will save $$ by killing 3rd party email encryption and having the business rely on exchange 365 encryption.

[Jon]

I've worked on it in three clients so far and they all had it licensed in a different way:

• Full Office 365 - SharePoint, Exchange and clients running O365.
• Sharepoint only - Office 2010/2007 clients
• Sharepoint and clients - Sharepoint and clients running O365

The bit when you switch over to clients running O365 is fairly significant because at that point your clients get auto-updated. So you have to drop the mentality of "It's too risky to upgrade Office" mindset because it's happening constantly now. It's a better mindset to have though. Companies spend thousands on doing Office upgrade risk assessments and inventories to find problems and mitigate risk. In almost all cases they would have saved money by just quickly finding the critical stuff and then just doing it and fixing the handful of problems as they arise. That's been my personal experience and seems like it's a common thread.

Edited July 21, 2015 by Jon

[jvanegmond]

I do some sysadmin for a small business owned by a relative, and I threw out their on-premise Exchange and file server which was a constant source of headaches and switched them over to Office 365. It's slightly more expensive but saves so much trouble and frustration. It's also great for flexibility as you don't have to worry about scaling up or down anymore. It's built in. 

Don't delude yourself that O365 will make sysadmin a breeze though. It's like running watered-down Exchange in a cloud. The good part is that Microsoft does a lot of the sysadmin for you but you will ocassionally need to powershell in and do things yourself (or ask customer support to do it).

[JLogan3o13]

@Jon that is what I am trying to convince this customer of. They get into that cycle of being unwilling to upgrade until every last possible scenario is tested, but can then never commit the resources to do just that. I often accuse their CIO of having "analysis paralysis", which is why they're still supporting not only the old office but web apps requiring IE6 and Java 1.3.1_08. Not something a (close to) billion-dollar company should be doing, but have yet to get them over the fear of just upgrading and remedying issues as they come up.