A few years ago I created a post on how far behind the curve Microsoft was with cloud offerings. I had personally placed more clients within Google Apps for Business at a rate of 100 to 0 over Office 365. Now the tides have tremendously turned. Many of the clients who went from On-Premise Exchange to Google Apps for Business have transitioned to Office 365 Enterprise or Office 365 Business Premium. There is a pattern in why these clients are moving back to a Microsoft platform. Some are more apparent than others. I will discuss some of the reasons and changes I have come across as well as my personal thoughts on the service and what it has meant for my clients.
To begin, I would like to first go over the current trend I work with on a normal basis. Many of my small and medium business clients who were still holding onto Windows SBS infrastructures, are now transitioning to Office 365. For the most part, these are the clients who were holding onto their equipment for as long as they could, or were waiting on budgets to align. These were also many of the clients that found that Google Apps for Business was not the right fit for their organization. After sitting down with many of these clients, and discussing what Microsoft currently offers with Office 365, verses building a new exchange server on top of upgrading outdated servers, they were finally more interested in moving their exchange services to a solution that was off-premise. For most of these clients the transition is fairly smooth: migrating mailboxes, creating a new Outlook profile, configuring new DNS settings, AD sync, and all of the details for a proper migration. Most organizations elect to go for the full license of the Office 365 suite and Lync, while others keep their previous Office suite volume licensing. These small and medium businesses are welcoming this change because of the availability for multiple device access, and remote or after-hour use. Many are already comfortable with accessing their email on their company provided or personal cell phones. With tablets and ultrabooks, the transition to mobile workstations has surpassed desktop sales for most of my clients. Very few businesses I work with have purchased a desktop computer in the last three years. Though Windows SBS offered Remote Web Workplace and Outlook Web App, very few of these clients tapped into the on-premise features that were open for remote use. As a result the organization was not in alignment with the technology they had at hand. Fast forward to the present time and they are requesting a remote cloud based solution. So why now? For starters when you begin displaying to the client that the servers are getting long in the tooth and that a critical element of their day to day tasks sit directly in their office, they realize that the responsibility lies directly on their shoulders. When something breaks, there is usually a technician dispatched to try and fix the problem (after the technician exhausts all remote options). This is the song and dance that has continued for many years. The ability for them to take the hardware and maintenance cost out of the equation, and have a service that is primarily up >90% of the time, budgets begin to shift from down time while awaiting the technician to arrive and then correct the issue, to rarely ever calling the technician for a full outage. The mobile aspect and push for greater uptime with less responsibility are two of the key feature these organizations are reaching for in this transition.
The next transition I would like to discuss is one that has sort of caught us off guard: existing Google Apps for Business clients shifting to Office 365. I say “caught off guard” but the reality is more in line with the number of businesses that are making this transition. We expected for some of our clients to transition due to the fact that they are still heavy Microsoft Office platform clients. During the transition from on-premise exchange to Google Apps for Business they requested the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (GASMO) tool as well as only using the storage portion of Google Drive. The pattern again here is the technology is not in alignment with the organizations daily operations. Google’s spreadsheet formatting was not optimal for their use in the majority of the scenarios. GASMO was restricting common calendaring features that were not supported by Google. For these clients the end result of migrating to the Office 365 for Business or Enterprise was just a matter of a few features, and the ultimate end goal of the technology being in alignment with their business operations. Some of the particular features, which may sound small to some but can make a huge impact to others, are things such as having a Global Address list integrate seamlessly with Active Directory, Excel documents integrating with CAD and REVIT drawings and diagrams, calendaring, and syncing color coding of entries seamlessly across devices. The last feature is the web interface of the platform. Microsoft has gone to great lengths in the last years to provide as many of the same features and user experience in the web platform as they offer in the desktop platform. With all of this being said, their reasoning the majority of the time is “We prefer the look, feel, and integration of Microsoft”. One of the other statements we get is that an executive or executives would just prefer Microsoft. So after a few years of organizations waiting out Microsoft’s shift, and improvements in their hosted services, clients are gaining a new found comfort in going back to the Microsoft business solution. This process of migration has also made a low impact on the required resources needed to migrate as well. Many online resources are available to transition from Google to Microsoft and visa versa. At the same the cost of migrating platforms in this manner is reduced in comparison to the cost of an on-premise migration.
Through both of these transitions I have displayed what some of my clients points of views are and what they have faced. I would like to now introduce my thoughts of the transition process.
The transition from on-premise to Office 365 has a greater impact on many organizations than you might think. The move to off load resources on-premise to a cloud solution being the most significant. This reduces overhead and cost of ownership. It alleviates the stress of relying on local hardware and the imminent factor of unforeseen minor or major disasters that range anywhere from a power outage to a life threatening natural disaster. These stresses on a physical server can begin to cause degradation on both the server and the attached storage housing the information. With a hosted solution many of the organizations resources are still available as long as the user can seek any type of internet access. Financially, the transition changes from usually a high dollar one-time project cost and ongoing maintenance costs to a long term subscription solution. This subscription fee also increases as the number of employees and features increase. In the same token, a growth in employees and features could increase costs if your on-premise solutions are contracted out as well. It really depends on the organizations structure. In the long run what this solution does benefit from is the removal of outdated equipment and the cost to upgrade once again within the ever shortening life cycle of close to three years for both servers and software. Granted these can be stretched past this theoretical life cycle.
The transition from Google Apps for Business to Office 365 has for the most part been pretty seamless. These clients making this transition are already hosted in the cloud. Moving data out of Google does have a window of 2GB per day per account no matter what service you transition to. That limitation alone needs to be factored in to properly manage the migration project. The majority of the labor on this transition is conducted at the desktop level. This includes setting up the Microsoft Office suite and loading the profiles. One of the distinct complications I have come across in this transition was primarily calendaring. Again much of it with color coding and personal settings within Outlook. Aside from the calendars, the contacts are the usual suspect and the first thing end users see as hardships in the transition. Contacts have been the stifler for every migration I have conducted. I can not count how many times the end users have improperly merged contacts on numerous devices they use. Aside from these few short comings, leveraging a third party to extract the data from Google is strongly recommended as it reduces the actual hands on hours in the migration.
For the most part the feedback on Office 365 has been fairly great. I can clearly state from a support stand point and the interactions with both Google and Office 365 support, Microsoft is very active in finding the resolution. Google on the other hand is, in my point of view, engineering centric with a very hands off approach to the end users. Many of the clients who are now on Office 365 are submitting less requests based on compatibility issues. They are also more focused on utilizing more features within the platform. The collaboration process has grown with clients using Lync, developing their SharePoint sites, and learning how the semi-confusing OneDrive for Business operates. As an employee of a Managed Service Provider, I can say that the one area with the greatest learning curve when transitioning to Office 365 for the end user is their online storage. OneDrive for Business is directly integrated with SharePoint. Many of the end users are accustomed to their cloud vaults being very easy to access and setup. This is one thing DropBox and Google have in common that make their services stand out. I personally feel that even if the backend is SharePoint based, Microsoft can integrate the links into the OneDrive profile a little more seamless than in its current configuration. Then allow the end user to paste additional SharePoint folders provided by the company or shared from individuals.
To close I would like to say that though I do not personally use Office 365, I can vouch for many clients that have made this transition. Office 365 for my organization would not be in alignment with how we operate. We do on the other hand have our own Office 365 account which is primarily used for both testing and training both in the cloud and on the desktop. I hope that some of the insight and knowledge you have read in this article will either help you in your transition or will provide a minor insight as to what impact moving to Office 365 will have for your organization.