Office 365 Q&A from Space Age Webinar

Office 365 in South Africa
Questions & Answers
extracted from a webinar held by
Space Age Technologies 25 June ‘12
Office 365 Webinar Questions Share on: Page 1

Table of Contents
• What are the available plans for Office 365? and across multiple devices?
• What are the main architecture options? • What is the experience like on a tablet?
• Mapping available Office 365 plans to the various • Do we still need to backup?
architectures • How do we share documents?
• Pros vs. Cons of traditional Office vs. Office 365 in a • Our current CRM system is based on our current Office
nutshell version, will the CRM system function automatically with
• What benefits does the desktop subscription to Office 365?
Professional Plus offer? • How does Office 365 compare to Google Apps?
• Is the 8$+3$ for archiving option still available? • Some specific answers about Google Apps vs. O365
• The data center is in Ireland, will it come to South Africa? • How good is Office 365?
• What are the top three Office 365 concerns of clients and • What, if any, are the best stages in a business's life to
what are our strategic answers? consider moving IT services to the Cloud?
• What are the hidden costs and is bandwidth an issue? • Will all my IT services, over time, move to the cloud?
• Security concerns • Will IT support providers still have a role to play in the
• Confidentiality and ownership of data increasingly cloud-connected world?
• Loss of control • What are the hidden costs and issues of the initial upload
• Uptime availability to the cloud?
• Security – How secure is my data in the cloud? • Is there a license discount when moving to Office 365 from
• Synchronization – How does synchronization work the normal desktop Office applications?
between on-premise services and the cloud? • Summary
• How can Office 365 be used in rural mostly offline areas


What are the available plans for
Office 365?
• Exchange Online
• P1 for small businesses, adds
Lync and SharePoint and
Word, PowerPoint, Excel and
OneNote to edit and create
online
• E1 and E2 for midsized
businesses gives all of the P1
with more granular control.
• E3 and E4 for enterprises,
offers unlimited archives
(100Gig soft limit) and Office
Professional Plus
• E-plans also all offer the
possibility of adding K-plans to
them for low IT usage users.


What are the main
architecture options?
Online The Hybrid and Federated solutions both bring
This is the most basic form, everything is online. up the question of reliance of the office for
You have a login username and password giving authentication and a solution for that is now
you access to your mailbox, files and here:
documents. Everything available in Office 365 is MS is bringing Azure to SA and with the
available online. additions it has made you can now run a
Federation machine in the cloud: you can make
On Premise server - Federated Solution a copy of your domain controller and put that
into the cloud as well
Use your own domain identity and connect that and then there is no more reliance on the
to the Office 365 cloud and then use your own internet connectivity into the office. So if the
network login to connect to Office 365. All the connection does go down people in the office
services are hosted in the cloud. are as affected as before: can mail between
themselves and those outside the office will
On Premise server and online hosting - Hybrid connect to the azure cloud to authenticate and
Solution then on to Office 365 where they will be
Allows to put some mailboxes online and keep unaffected by the outage except when mailing
some offline or have some SharePoint sites on those inside the office.
premises and online as well.


From Space Age Technologies’ SharePoint Client site


Mapping available Office 365 plans
to the various architectures
The P1 plan for small businesses allows you to use the online option only.
For E1-E4 plans the other 3 options (federated, hybrid, with azure) are also available.

Pros vs. Cons of traditional Office
vs. Office 365 in a nutshell
The pros and cons are the same as for any other cloud based system:
• Pro: less concern with maintaining infrastructure, opex vs. capex, pay for what you need, and
only when you need it
• Cons: control, IT feels like they're losing control, there may be some hidden costs


What benefits does the desktop
subscription to Professional Plus offer?
With the E3/4 plans you also get a
subscription for Pro Plus, it is a substantial
jump in price. In addition to Office being
available on a month by month subscription it
also adds InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace and
Lync 2010 to the package.

Is the 8$+3$ for archiving option still
available?
The $8 plans for Exchange Online are still available (they are equivalent to an Exchange Only
E1-plan).
In the Exchange online plans archiving is included. However if you run Exchange locally and
want to archive your documents in the MS datacenter you can add it for $3 per user for this.


The data center is in Ireland, will it
come to South Africa?
No plans by MS to bring a datacenter to South
Africa yet. We're using Dublin and will be for
the foreseeable future.
International bandwidth is not so much of a
problem in South Africa any more. We have
more an issue of last mile.

What are the top three • Security
Office 365 concerns of • Confidentiality
clients and what are
our strategic answers?
• Bandwidth


What are the hidden costs and
is bandwidth an issue?
There are hidden costs with bandwidth, bandwidth will go
up. You are traversing the internet for internal mail, you
will bring up documentation in SharePoint which you are
going to be downloading and uploading, saving back and
forth.
But there is also always a hidden cost in IT on premise, the
hidden cost in the form of downtime, with a cloud solution
patching will go down. It's extremely difficult for any SME
to have 99.9% uptime. The general cost of maintaining the
infrastructure is no longer a concern. You just pay a
subscription per user.

Security concerns
Office 365 is a public cloud solution, meaning the company Microsoft manages Exchange, SharePoint
and all these hosted properties for lots of clients and yes it is potentially a very high profile target for
anybody who wants to access your data. But even though we at Space Age are incredibly good at
protecting our client's data, we are not sure that we will be able to match Microsoft's capability and
expertise in protecting the data in their data centers. From a security point of view, Office 365 is a
much better option than any local provider could ever offer.


Confidentiality and
ownership of data
From a confidentiality and ownership of data point of view, a very good thing about Office 365 is
that should a company decide to move away from the hosted datacenter it's actually quite easy for
them to export that data, run local servers again, like a local Exchange server, SharePoint server,
import and rebuild the data and essentially continue running. That is in comparison to quite a lot of
the other solutions that make it extremely difficult to get data out of the data centers.

Yes, instead of a local IT support structure, whether in house

Loss of or as a managed service, the control over fixing any problems
that may arise is gone. However, Microsoft offers a 99.9%

control
financially backed SLA which is something nearly impossible
to match.
If you calculate that back over a year of downtime it comes
to about 9 hours for a specific service. Which IT service
provider can guarantee only up to 9 hours downtime per
year without any higher availability and infrastructure? And
that includes all patching work and infrastructure upgrades. If
Microsoft can’t deliver then they are going to pay a portion
of the fee back to the client.


Uptime availability
The bigger question from an uptime availability point of view is how reliable is the bandwidth. If the
internet is down there is no access to Office. Fortunately with broadband 3G connections becoming more
and more prevalent, it's actually quite easy to have people connect via other devices or go home if there
is an ADSL line and continue working remotely.
So yes, the infrastructure does change, but as long as you plan for it carefully, it's actually quite easy to
work around it and essentially gain so much more in the long run from moving to the cloud.

Security – How secure is my
data in the cloud?
If you're worried about MS internally looking at your data we'd be more concerned with in-house IT
administrators who know who you are and know what your business is than the IT administrators of the
MS datacenter who have hundreds of thousands accounts to look after. They are less likely interested in
the data than in-house IT would be.
As for general security against data loss, Microsoft is going to do a much better job at securing the data
than we, as managed service provider, or the average SME IT person can do.


How does synchronization work between on-
premise services and the cloud?

First off, it doesn't actually synchronize. For However you can synchronize between your
Exchange a mailbox is either hosted on premise devices. For Exchange, you keep a local copy of
or it's hosted in the cloud, so think of a shared your mail in Outlook and you can synchronize
email domain in two different forests in a portions to SharePoint or entire libraries in
standard traditional Exchange environment; SharePoint Workspace or you can connect the
SharePoint unique IDs are assigned to on library in question to outlook like a shared folder
premise documents and other unique IDs are just as you wish.
assigned to the documents as they're put in the On SharePoint WorkSpace - that is only
cloud so they're not carried over but there are pertaining to plan E3/4, because those include
workarounds if you want to synchronize Office Professional. You can also get Office Pro
documents in SharePoint. in another way by signing agreements with
For Lync, all services are hosted in one or two Microsoft for enterprise wide licensing for Office
places, either on premise - if you're going to use Pro. And then you'd have access to sync to
or if you want to use Enterprise Voice (Lync as SharePoint workspace. But in any of the plans
your PABX); otherwise use the cloud - you can connect SharePoint document libraries
everything goes into the cloud. to outlook 2010.


How can Office 365 be used in rural mostly
offline areas and across multiple devices?
That is solved via synchronization as just locally.
discussed. Outlook works in off-line mode as it As for other devices, there are ways of
does currently with Exchange on premise. If connecting to them. Most of them will require
you're not connected you still have access to you to be online because most of them have
your mail. SharePoint document libraries can be only the mechanism for interfacing with
synchronized to Outlook, which means you can SharePoint through a web browser.
keep a local copy of that library and those files Of course for your Mail the mail application
and that library in Outlook or in SharePoint would work as it currently does. There are there
workspace and Lync maintains a contact list are apps for the iPad that will sync portions of
locally for each user. As a user my contacts in SharePoint back to your iPad or your iPhone.
Lync are available offline and can be maintained


What is the
experience
like on a
tablet?

It's actually very
good. Tablets are
used to consume
data and to access
what's stored in
SharePoint and
your mail is easy .


Do we still need to backup?
In the sense that most SMEs understand the your data indefinitely, bear in mind this will put it offline somewhere hasn't been there for
term backup, no, it doesn’t exist anymore. The affect your mailbox sizes however. a while for big companies. For most SMEs, and
Microsoft data centre on which the platform The RTO is one hour, so they'll have your mail many of our clients, all their data still fits on a
runs on is all redundant. back in an hour and the RPO is almost tape. And very often if you can do that and put
You won’t find any tapes lying around with instantaneous. This has to do with how the it offline it's the best solution.
your data on them and Microsoft does not do architecture of the environment is built. However their data needs increase too and
any system and machine backups. They The SharePoint backups happen every 12 they increasingly need 24/7 availability and
synchronize them, duplicate them and hours, and they retain for 14 days. But with need to look at other solutions. Which means
replicate them, making them totally document versioning in SharePoint itself, the essentially doing what enterprises have done
redundant which means there is no need to previous versions of the document are stored for a long time, using redundancy. Many
worry about backing up at all. indefinitely depending on the storage people feel funny about it, as if they're losing
When it comes to backup there are certain availability in SharePoint. The RTO for control. The question asked is, what happens
metrics to look for: SharePoint is about 6 hours. And the RPO is if the entire datacenter goes down. And that is
• RTO, the recovery time objective and back to about an hour. a mindset shift that we have to get over.
• RPO recovery point objective. This is really a mind shift in the way we don't Fortunately for those companies who still
talk/concentrate on backup anymore like we want to have some offline backup, there are
As it concerns Office 365 you have two options available where specific solutions can
primary concerns for backup, being Exchange used to, we're doing backup in a different
way. Generally enterprises have spent a lot be licenses allowing them to backup data from
and SharePoint. the hosted solution to some sort of offline
more money in the past on using redundancy
With Exchange you have recycle bins and you as the preferred method of keeping data copy.
have retention periods which are set on safe, whereas SMEs never really had that As an IT managed service provider we will in
deleting items. 14 days for mail items, 30 days option and used traditional tape backups. future monitor less backups and spend more
for mail boxes, which is the default and can be time on redundancy for them. Over time the
changed, so you can reclaim these mails if you The question of whether data has to be
backed up or not had to be answered by big concern for backup is going to fade away as
need to. With mailboxes you can also enable people get used to the idea of redundancy.
Legal Hold, which means Microsoft will keep companies a long time ago. There is so much
data out there, the option to take data and


How do we share
documents?
SharePoint workspace is made up of two parts. administrators have set up sharing. And you can
The first one is a team part where everyone in a share entire sites with individuals or colleagues
company or anybody in a particular depending how the site's set up.
organizational unit within the company can For example we are using a SharePoint
share and use documents and work on Workspace site shared with specific partners,
documents at the same time. It's all about who are outside our organization, for them to
collaboration that's really what SharePoint does have access to certain documentation about
and it does it exceptionally well. And then you Office 365. They login with their own Office 365
have your own site: kind of like "My credentials or their own Live IDs and they will be
Documents" but then online in "My Site" which able to get access to that site. This is a separate
allows you to store your own private documents workspace set up for sharing externally and you
and files and you can also share those. You can will get access to it once you’ve signed up for
share individual documents with friends or the O365 trial via Space Age.
colleagues depending on how the


Our current CRM system is based on our
current Office version, will the CRM system
function automatically with Office 365?
As long as the CRM is using Outlook 2010 or 2007 you shouldn't have any issues whatsoever. If
you're using Office 2003 there will be some issues connecting to Exchange online but they're not
insurmountable. It's not supported by MS but we are probably able to help you. As to whether the
CRM is going to function with the new Office depends on the CRM application. We'll have to trial it
and see how it works or chat to the people who built the CRM.
Many CRMs have custom hooks into MS applications and if these hooks go directly to the Exchange
server or directly to specific servers for specific functions then we may have some problems which
means that the specific CRM application has to be adapted to make sure the access to the Office
365 servers works.
You can generally assume that the latest version of the CRM will work. If it is Dynamics it does
definitely work with Office 365.


How does Office 365
compare to Google Apps?
If you put 50 IT professionals in a room and you they don't replace it. You can get applications
ask them this question you will get two first that plug in to do things in GA that could be
choices and you'll get 50 different reasons why done with SharePoint but you're having to add
Google or Office 365 is their first choice. complexity to an offering that's supposed to be
We can only speak from my own experience. simple and easy to use.
One of our clients used Google Apps and is now The truth about finding out which one is better
migrating to Office 365. for you is you would have to try Google Apps
Google Apps is a great platform but it's not the and Office 365 and then decide which one you
same as Office 365. like better or talk to somebody at Space Age to
There is no real SharePoint or Exchange look at your requirements and look at what your
replacement in Google Apps. Some issues with needs are and compare the features that you
calendar sharing were a primary concern for need with each of those products. We have
that client of ours. Google Sites + Google Docs experience with both offerings and will be able
don't replace SharePoint. They provide you with to advise you accordingly.
some of the functionality SharePoint has but


Some specific answers about
Google Apps vs O365
Email threads are supported from Office 2010 (as Conversations) and work for any mail received
and sent from Office 365 / Outlook, your historic conversation may import correctly too but we
would need to check that to confirm..
Archives in Office 365 are separate mailboxes in the cloud which displayed as a separate mailbox on
the PC or Mac..
You can upload multiple pst's to Office 365.
The initial mail set up involves importing a .pst file to the Outlook client already connected to O365,
Outlook will sync that mail back to the Exchange server and eventually it will be available in the
online version.


How good is Office 365?
Our opinion: excellent. We wouldn't have been able to create our partner site and wouldn't have
been able to make it available to partners before Office 365 or at least before SharePoint online.
And we were never going to look at SharePoint online except as part of a package like Office 365 so
that's fantastic.
Mail is actually quicker when not in the office, so when working from home we haven’t
experienced the usual slower speed issues.
Some things we like:
• Archive mailbox, previously not available at our offices due to space limitations on our
Exchange Server.
• 100gb archive
• Lync in the cloud is amazing, we've started using Lync to communicate with clients and it makes
life a lot easier. This federation is turned on by default in Office 365 and works very well (albeit
slightly different to an on-premise installation).


What, if any, are the best stages in a
business's life to consider moving IT
services to the Cloud?
With regards to Office 365 specifically it’s certainly not also additional opportunities where different business
the right moment when you've just purchased functions might want to investigate new applications,
hardware and software and you have some life left on so for example HR comes and says I need a new
your infrastructure. One of the big advantages of employee appraisal system. When you come to that
moving to the cloud is that you can convert your point it probably is a good idea to try and find out if
capital expenses to operational expenses but of there is anybody out there that has the perfect solution
course that's not going to be a good idea if you've just offered as a SaaS option, where you just link in and
purchased all the hardware and / or software. The ideal perhaps pay a monthly fee without having to invest in
opportunity to evaluate Office 365 is whenever a big internal hardware and software. For example at Space
infrastructure refresh comes up. Age we're using an outsourced HR system, and
As for moving to the cloud in general and when it is a appraisal system for the last 4 or 5 years and we are
good time it depends on what we refer to when we talk incredibly happy that this is not residing only on our
about cloud because there are so many different own infrastructure.
solutions out there. Office 365 we referred to, then When a business function wants to invest in new
there's Azure which gives you the opportunity to move software it’s a good idea to first look at what is
your entire datacenter out into the cloud. The same available in the cloud before actually deciding to
applies as just mentioned; a good time is when an invest in new hardware and software internally.
infrastructure update is imminent. But then there are


Will all my IT services, over
time, move to the cloud?
At Space Age Technologies we believe have significant cloud investments. We
over time nearly everything will move may still have some data residing in
to the cloud. Not everyone agrees but local datacenters or in company
we think it’s just a matter of time, the specific data centers purely from a legal
question is, how much time. point of view, e.g. the defense industry
Commodity services which are able to needs to store data locally and from an
maximize standardized infrastructure archiving point of view, perhaps from a
and systems have to move to the cloud, data analysis point of view. If a
for example email, security, storing company has massive amounts of data
documents online. it might not be feasible to move it all to
Then we're starting to talk about the cloud, so there are still some
financial applications, HR applications, workloads that will take a little bit
perhaps even ERP applications, those longer to move to the cloud but we
sort of systems we're seeing many of estimate within the next 10 years there
the vendors starting to really introduce won’t be any serious company that will
very good offerings hosted in the even have 10-20% of the current
datacenters and that move is going to datacenter investment locally. All the
happen in the next 3-5 years, so in 5 rest will move to the cloud.
years’ time many of the companies will


Will IT support providers still have a
role to play in the increasingly cloud-
connected world?
The role of the IT support provider will change really start innovating and making a difference
over time. Currently most are still concerned in a business. We call that Relevant IT at Space
with the maintaining of local infrastructure. Of Age and invest heavily in finding ways to help
course reducing that expensive infrastructure is our clients strategize better including IT as an
one of the main reasons for moving to the cloud important component. For example how to use
so many MSPs see a threat in the cloud. This is BI, business information, to extract actionable
why we for some time have already started to and meaningful data making IT speak
shift towards the next level of IT innovation strategically for a business.
which is to talk more about the promise of IT for We at Space Age absolutely embrace the cloud
small businesses. The truth is, most SMEs are and now that we have the path forward, we're
not getting the full value of what IT promises to seeing it as a big equalizer and a big opportunity
do. 70-80% of the money goes towards again to really get a leg up on the competition.
maintaining the infrastructure and little is left to


Join our Relevant IT
discussion group for
CIOs and IT mangers
on LinkedIn


What are the hidden costs and issues of
the initial upload to the cloud?
The hidden costs are those not related to Microsoft directly. They do not charge an initiation fee,
they don't mind how quickly or how slowly you move the data into the cloud. But for example for a
client of ours we had to charge extra as it involved bringing all of the pst's to a central location
because we got extremely fast bandwidth here and used the weekend to actually push those pst's
to the individual mailboxes. The hidden cost then is time and bandwidth.
If you've got enough of both it's relatively simple to do. You have to import the .pst for a particular
mailbox into an outlook client that is connected to that mailbox. This does depend on the capacity
of the online Exchange mailbox. Most of the Exchange plans offer enough space with 25 Gb
mailboxes across the board for all plans. The E plans offer an additional 100 Gb soft limit (it will
grow to allow whatever you put in it) archive that you can add to it.

Is there a license discount when moving to Office
365 from the normal desktop Office applications?
There are discounts available depending on various circumstances. Best to discuss this with one of
our licensing specialist.


Summary
When is it a good time to consider Office 365?
At the time of a major IT investment decision point.

What are the important decisions to make before starting with Office 365?
Which architecture is to be implemented
Which licensing model caters for the needs of your (growing) company
Which if any partner to use with migrating to Office 365 (You can go directly to Microsoft for the first time
but they advise to use a partner due to the additional support and migration services available)

What follows Office 365?
Azure - for business continuity or disaster management (is imminent in SA not fully launched yet)
private cloud - using your hardware more efficiently by pulling resources
hybrid cloud - scale virtually on demand and only pay as you go as you scale up

What are the next steps?
Wait and see – keep an eye on our Office 365 blog posts
Sign up for 30 day trial, click on the button ->
Consult with a Space Age Technologies solutions
consultant to design a solution for your company


Office 365 Q&A from Space Age Webinar

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