MS Office 365 Vs Hosted Exchange: A Comparison

Microsoft has done a decent job of marketing its new online service but it could have done a bit better educating consumers as to what it actually is. Many of our customers have come to us wondering what the differences were between their current hosted explanation and Microsoft Office 365. While there are many nuance to this assessment it is good to get the 5 big ones out of the way to see if you are still concerned before you delve into any of the smaller details by www.office.com/setup




Limits

Check your limits with your current provider. If you run an on-premise solution then there are no real limits. Your query may be more about Total Cost of Ownership vs. these limits. The main limits are:
  • 25GB Mailbox
  • 25MB attachments
  • 30 messages per minute/per user
  • 250 seat online meetings
Blasting emails to hundreds of thousands of users? No good. 26 MB attachments? Look elsewhere. Additionally, if you are using Mail Enabled Lists in SharePoint you will not be able to continue to use those in Office 365. (Mail enabled lists are listed within SharePoint that you can email to. SharePoint catalogues the mail and stores the attachments)

The Hosting Company

Who is currently hosting your solution? Office 365 is run and managed by Microsoft Office them with a financially backed 99.9% uptime guarantee. Your current provider may be doing 99.99% or higher but if you are running the chances of your own server are you’re not getting that type of up-time. The difference between 99.9% and 99.99% is 8.76 hours of unscheduled downtime per year vs. less than 1 hour per year. You have to decide what type of downtime your company can withstand. We do like that Microsoft is backing the downtime guarantee financially since it puts Microsoft on the hook for a lot of money were they to have any outages. source

The Bundle

Besides email are you getting Instant Messaging, SharePoint, and Lync Online for meetings? Most are getting the earliest two but few are getting all three. Only you can answer if you actually need all three. Additionally, some plans come with versions of Microsoft Office which we will get to later.

This is Office 2019

There are a few outfits out there that offer hosted Exchange that is using Exchange 2019. For a while, it was a differentiated. However, the entire Office 365 suite of products is the 2019 version. Exchange 2019, SharePoint 2019, Lync 2019 and Microsoft Office 2019.

Microsoft Office Professional Plus

This is perhaps the biggest difference because it is in effect an entirely new way to license Office 2019. Instead of paying one large sum to receive a perpetual license of Office 2019 Professional Suite, this version of Office is subscription-based. The Microsoft Office Web Apps sit negatively within SharePoint. Simply click on a MS Word Document and choose edit and you are in a light but quite a functional version of office.com/setup MS Office.

These are your major consideration when weigh your existing solution against Microsoft Office 365.


Grace Edens is a Technical expert and she has been working in the technology industry. (www.webroot.com/safe) As a technical expert, she her written technical blogs, (www.avg.com/retail) white papers, and reviews for many websites. mcafee.com/activate

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