Microsoft Office 365, Azure portals offline for many users in Europe Microsoft's Office 365 service has gone offline for many users in the UK and Europe, though the cause and extent of the outage is not yet known. Neither the Office 365 portal, nor the Azure management portal is available at the time of writing, though Microsoft's status page says everything is fine. Everthing is fine says …
I have been repeatedly offered Office 365 from two different providers I use for hosted Exchange.
I always refuse.
My exchange providers run their own servers, whereas MS run the 365 servers. All they are is resellers of the 365 service.
So for the same reason I won't use Google Mail or apps, I won't use Office 365. Who do I call and yell at when it's not working? Where will the accountability be?
And if I was selecting services for clients... when they call and yell at me, who am I supposed to yell at?
You'll never know where your email is hosted with 365. With hosted Exchange, it's much more transparant.
The problems I had with billing snafus on 365 just for gaining use of applications that we'd paid for - total nightmare. Would never want that dire level of communication when chasing a fix for downed email servers.
What you don't get is the old "familiarity breeds contempt" meme. They're, whoever they are, quite used to watching you flail around at trying something/anything to bring something/anything to bring the systems back online. What they haven't experienced yet is the experts Pro's from Dover doing the same thang when it's their turn in the barrel.
After the first (few) times either they'll get used to it [not likely], revert to type or in other words put you back on the job [yea, right], or figure out a way that "it's your fault anyway" [most likely]. Have a resume ready in all of the above scenarios.
But I'm surrounded by a management team of penny pinchers and "architects" that think they know what they are doing (they don't, they are lazy fucks - "designed" a system that basically meant not designing anything).
I have been STAUNCHLY against using Office 365 since the first day someone on my team mentioned it. This is just one of a few outages recently and other shitty problems that would never have occurred had we stayed on-prem.
Totally agree with you! We currently run Exchange 2010 and Office 2010 so will be looking at upgrading next year or maybe stretch to the year after. Colleagues at a closely related business recently migrated from Exchange and Office 2007 to hosted 365 and so we saw an email from their support guys this morning detailing issues. First thing my boss says was "more ammunition to management to not go the hosted route!" ALL of the main players in cloud service have been hit with issues, be it Google, Amazon or Microsoft. Plus you could be effected if you lost your internet connection for any reason (some twonk dug up a fibre, etc) So we will be sticking with an on the premises soloution!
Last weekend I installed a 60 user Exchange 2016 server at a customers. Didn't need to be super fast as all the staff are external. 365 on paper seemed the best way to go, but on the basis that a hosted exchange account was around £6 a month per user, or £360 per month, or £4320 per year, their little system cost £10k, that also includes server 2012r2 + 60 device CALs, Exchange + 60 CALS and Symantec SMSMSE, 60 Licenses. They will now support Outlooks from 2010 right through to the next 2 versions, basically a good 10 years of service. (although the physical server might not last that long, but exchange has been virtualized)
So on March 2018 they will hit the point where having an onprem becomes cost effective.
Oh, and they have 2Tb set aside for their mailboxes, not the 25Gb per mailbox limit that 365 imposes (althought I have set a cap of 30Gb for the time being, but even that looks like it would take 8 years to reach with most accounts that I exported)
Lots of unacounted costs in your short estimation.
You should factor at least the cost of the power for the server, the associated temperature control system and the cost of the physical server room (the last two might be very low if there were already a server room on premise)
However, I'm pretty sure it'll still be far more cost effective than the cloudy based solution.
Not really.
Haven't found my workload lessening since moving. The only thing that has got less is the pressure.
Still have accounts to create, mail to manage and all the other normal things to do, just doing it on a different platform.
As to the argument that someone else will be able to do my job, true, but I know have 'cloud migration' experience which means I should be able to get a job easier somewhere else too.
The world moves on.
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