Exchange is dead, long live office 365
by Alex
Posted on May 1, 2018 at 12:00 PM
Wow that's a big statement but let's be honest it's what Microsoft want, they have outpriced dedicated server licensing, removed SBS from their product stack and really gone all out to push office 365. As I once heard the CEO of Microsoft say, the train has left the station we are going cloud and its time for everyone to jump onboard or be left behind !
And to be honest its a good direction to go. Microsoft Exchange requires a lot of resources, is tricky to manage and is clunky. It was never really built for small and medium sized business but for larger enterprises who have a whole pool of resources available to them. Not only does this save you on local server resources, it saves backup resources which is handled by office 365 for 30 days. If you have a Small Business server system it would be advisable to move your mail to the cloud and free up the resources of the server for the active directory, and file server services, or completely reprovisioning the server for another purpose ( as its probably one of your more powerful systems)
Office 365 Exchange mailboxes offer huge amounts of redundancy, compliance, they are secure and can store a massive volume of data without any issues. Microsoft also bundle their products with a stack of useful apps and data storage facilities that can be really useful to most small medium sized business. This does not mean the end of the local server though as it is still important to have an active directory and be able to control users on the network. It is not advisable in any scenario to have lots of independent workstation with no central control.
Then we come to the BIG question everyone asks. What about price? I have already spent my monies on a server and have the licenses for exchange, it does not make financial sense to move. For very large organisations this may be the case but Microsoft have increased the price of the new exchange server to push companies away from this way of thinking, and have improved the stack of apps and features on the hosted system so much to entice you in this direction. At some point you are going to have to update your systems (especially as Microsoft have very clear end of life policies for their software) at that time look really hard at the real costs of Exchange over a set lifecycle and you will probably realise that its better to go with Office 365. Although it is not pushed heavily on their site, they sell a couple of barebones Office 365 Exchange mailbox solutions such as Exchange plan 1 and exchange plan 2.
Its always easy to forget but administering, creating users, shared calenders, organising room allocations is far easier on office 365. There is an entire compliance section and the ability to have people placed on legal hold (which means there data is never deleted, even from the deleted items menu). Although as with most Microsft products it is a work in progress, Office 365 is maturing well and is definitely a great addition for most business and I will not be sorry to see the end of Exchange servers.