Hi Joe -
Yes, our company made the transition from hosting an exchange server ourselves to Office 365 about 6 months ago. Our experience has been very good. Exchange is Microsoft's toughest server product to manage - if it goes down your entire company's email stops working until you figure out the issue and the error messages are cryptic.
Here are the advantages we found:
a) no more server management
b) eliminated risk of email failure due to internet outages, extended power failures, etc. Our head office is in Houston and power was out 2 weeks during Hurricane Ike.
c) web access client is better
d) Office 365 comes with Lync, Microsoft's instant messaging service. We use this now instead of Skype as Lync is more secure, has a better mobile client and has integrated "presence" with your Outlook calendar. This means your status is "in a meeting" in Lync during an event in your Outlook calendar.
e) sync works flawlessly on iPhones, iPads and Android devices
Challenges:
Only one: the conversion wasn't entirely smooth. I think they have updated their conversion tools since we did it. Plan on a weekend conversion as loading up email history takes a while
Here's the link if anyone wants to look at it:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/default.aspx -------------------------------------------
Bruce Vanderzyde
President
Anterra Technology, LLC
Missouri City TX
(832) 342-1575
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-25-2012 08:05
From: Joseph Burkett
Subject: Office 365
Has anyone out there made the move from hosted Exchange to Office 365? If you've looked at the move, but haven't, why not?
Looking forward to your thoughts.
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Joseph Burkett CCIFP
CFO
Cafco Construction Management, Inc.
Boston MA
(617) 426-7600
jburkett@cafcoconstruction.com
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