Jun 11
Watch out, Exchange Online is going to be a player in the marketplace!
This is my first time at Tech Ed. I’ve been able to talk with a lot of Microsoft product managers, and have a deeper understanding on where the products are currently, and where they’re headed in near term.
One of more interesting sessions I attended was using Exchange 2010 to achieve Rich Coexistence with Exchange Online.
For those of you not familiar with Exchange Online, it is an Exchange hosted service provided by Microsoft. In a coexistence scenario, you still have Exchange servers in your datacenter with mailboxes, but you will also have some mailboxes hosted by Microsoft. The users will share your domain name, but there are some draw backs with the Exchange 2010 pre-SP1 coexistence solution.
The first thing to note is that almost all of the features they are marketing are not yet available. They are purposely non-committal on the Exchange Online updates and the Exchange 2010 SP1 date.
The biggest complaint they received with the current coexistence is the lack of Free/Busy and calendar sharing between the on-premise and cloud based mailboxes. This will be addressed along with quite a few other items.
Going forward, you can still do a “simple” coexistence as all the features can be turned on one by one.
Here’s a table that compares the simple and rich coexistence options.
With all that said, these advancements make Exchange Online very viable for organizations. I can think of a dozen use case scenarios where having some users in the cloud would be beneficial.
And I have not heard the exact numbers, but the cost should be much cheaper per mailbox than hosting on-premise.
Another bigger, but not so obvious scenario, would be to just move your archive mailboxes to the cloud. This would save a lot of disk space and you could rely on Microsoft’s infrastructure to maintain it.
And what about remote workers? They’re already connecting to the Internet, why not use Microsoft’s pipe for their mailbox?
Something not in the table: think about how much easier onboarding (moving to Exchange Online) and offboarding (moving from Exchange Online to on-premise) will be with Rich Coexistence. You will be able to move users from Exchange 2010 while they’re online. They won’t even know you’re doing it.
And since the Exchange Online and on-premise forests are both managed from the same Exchange Management Console (EMC), moving a user between environments is simple.
Here is quick screen shot of a move via the EMC to the cloud.
Additionally, when moving a user, you can choose to migrate the data first and then “flip” them to the new environment on a specified day and time, like 2 AM on Sunday for example.
I have several other items that I want to share from this week including one frustrating item, and solution I found regarding iPhone and iPad appointments. Stay tuned…