RE: Once you go hybrid, you can never be fully in O365... Here is the way I understand it as it relates to decomming the hybrid email environment...you can:
1. Leave a single Exchange server on premises, which can be used for management of user and application relays. 2. Remove Exchange and do the mailbox management in ADUC within the attribute tab. 3. Use a 3rd party solution to manage Exchange like http://365command.com/ when Exchange has been removed. I just moved into more of a consultant role and I believe I'll be seeing http://365command.com in play very soon. Currently I have no experience. At my last place, we were considering leaving an Exchange server on premises for a bit and then trying out http://365command.com. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Tavares Sent: Friday, May 22, 2015 7:11 AM To: '[email protected]' Subject: [Exchange] RE: Exchange Online O365 vs On-Premise At my previous employer, I migrated about 1200 mailboxes. Generally pretty happy with it but here is a list of things to consider 1. If you go the Hybrid route, you will be stuck with Hybrid forever. There is currently no way to completely remove the hybrid environment once the last user is migrated. 2. If you have users maintaining their own groups on-Prem (via the outlook client) they will no longer be able to do this once they are migrated to o365. Only work-around is to create 0365 based groups (and they don't replicate back to on-prem). 3. Troubleshooting becomes more difficult. Since you have no control over what servers the users end up on, you can end up in a situation where 1 user is having problems and everyone is ok. This gets to be really annoying 4. Office 365 support (regular and premier is HORRIBLE). They are slow to respond and every answer for the slowness is SORRY BUT we have unexpectedly high ticket volumes. 5. Support is outsourced (including premier) and 99% of the time these folks had no visibility into 0365 and/or even the 0365 dashboard, so be prepared to spend a long time on the phone 6. If you are a typical company and the wheels of updating browsers and software tend to slower than molasses running uphill in blizzard, be ready for that to change 7. In a HYBRID configuration any and all issues you report will be troubleshoot as an ON-PREM issue, until it is proven that on-prem is not the issue. (I had a case with premier, where the error clearly stated that the mailbox server in 0365 was causing the error, Microsoft had an alert up saying they were having issues, and I still spent 8 hours troubleshooting on-prem because they can't escalate the ticket until their script is complete) 8. Migration speed was wildly variable. I had some large (20 gig+ mailboxes that took a few hours to migrate, and some that took days or longer to move). MS's response was basically, try not to migrate your users when other large customers are migrating their users (we paid 100k plus for this level of premier support). 9. O365 does not backup your mailboxes. Over the course of the 2 years I had users in 0365, I had 3 mailboxes that were so corrupt the only option MS gave us was to delete the mailbox and restore it from backup, For me I had no say in the migration to the cloud, that was made by an exec. I outlined my concerns but we went that way anyway. Knowing what I know now, I would have fought a lot harder to keep it on-prem. For ADFS/DIRSYNC If you choose ADFS your users will still get the username password prompt, they have to update it with their upn/password and click the remember me option, and they won't see it again until they change their password. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gannon, Todd Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2015 9:04 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [Exchange] Exchange Online O365 vs On-Premise Hi - We currently have a Exchange on-premise 2010 environment in a DAG across two sites with 12 databases housing approx 2500 mailboxes and Unified Messaging hosting voice mail. Apart from some initial teething problems due to disk latency, the setup has worked great for the past 4 years, and Exchange has not missed a beat. I am now at the stage where I am considering upgrades to either Exchange 2013 on-premise or Exchange Online O365. As part of some POC testing I have set up a tenant in O365 and have moved some mailboxes and it is working fine. So I suppose I am looking for anyone who has gone through a similar experience with a hybrid scenario and if they can detail any gotchas with a O365 migration, and if they had their time again, would you choose to stay on-premise? I've read lots of technical documentation around this but I would like to hear any feedback from the real world to give me some idea of direction that I choose. On top of this, a couple of questions ADFS vs DirSync? I have dirsync set up. Is ADFS a benefit for O365? Does single sign on work for Outlook 2010+ or is there still credential pop up? Express Route - Are companies using this for Exchange online? Unified Messaging - I'm still getting my head around this part.. Any ideas or views appreciated! Thanks for that. Todd
