5 TIPS ON USING A CLOUD BASED OFFICE

Microsoft’s Office 365 offers the prospect of cloud-based collaboration and productivity. Some things just work differently in the cloud. Your employees need to understand how their daily activities will change as a result of moving to Office 365. But no need to be anxious, since Microsoft training videos and extensive training resources are available to help both users and administrators get up-to-speed quickly.

Here just a few of the things you should know about Office 365 before you get started:

EMAIL

The most significant part of moving to Office 365 is your email migration. All of your e-mail is stored in the cloud. You’d think this would be obvious, but people only see their Outlook client and don’t really think about it. This makes it easy to consume anywhere, but changes how you manage and access your services.

You want to ensure that there is no message loss or downtime, but at the same time there is inevitably a great deal of historical data that has to be either archived or moved to the new environment.  When setting up Office 365, all your new email accounts should be created first, including all distribution lists. Once those accounts are created, the MX records can be changed, ensuring that incoming email seamlessly switches from the old environment to the 365 mailboxes. Then it’s a case of uploading historical emails using automated tools or on a user by user basis.

RECOVERY OF DELETED ITEMS

Recovering accidentally changed or deleted items is different than with an on-premises solution. Users can access the Recover Deleted Items feature in Outlook. Administrators have access to additional tools, but the default retention policy in Office 365 only keeps deleted items for 30 days.

REQUIREMENTS AND LIMITS

To ensure a good, consistent experience across thousands of customers, Microsoft had to place some limits on how the service is used:

Mailboxes are limited to 25 GB of storage unless you upgrade your plan.

  • You can e-mail a maximum of 1,500 recipients (total, not unique) per day.
  • E-mails can be a maximum of 25 MB in size, including all content and attachments.
  • There are no public folders in Office 365. Yes, it’s time to move to SharePoint.
  • Speaking of SharePoint, you’ll get 10 GB of space plus 500 MB per user of shared storage.

There are limits on each of the services, but the aforementioned are the most important. Review them before you sign up for Office 365 to ensure it’s the right solution for you.

INTERNET DEPENDENCY

Office 365 is exceptionally good at handling email on poor internet connections. It continues working in the background, regardless of the speed of your internet connection, sending and receiving emails without the user being aware of it happening.  However, slow internet connections can be an issue if you are using Sharepoint to store documents. This can be overcome by synchronising documents locally, using the Sharepoint check in and out option.

Office 365 natively supports Sharepoint for document storage. Sharepoint is a sophisticated environment allowing document check in and out, automatic versioning and a company Intranet site. Used properly, it provides a secure, flexible, audited environment for users to share any type of document. It’s difficult to use it as a standard online folder without third party tools, which some users would prefer.

ACCESSING WITH A MOBILE DEVICE

Microsoft now supports all the common mobile devices, including Blackberry, iPhone, Android and of course, Windows. The standard Office 365 account includes a Blackberry Enterprise Server, which means that full Blackberry functionality is preserved. iPhone and Android both support Exchange servers, so connect natively with full email, contact and calendar functionality.

All company documents can also be accessed through Sharepoint or third party tools.

Dependency on Cloud services is seen by many as a risk, however, given that Microsoft are behind it, you can be assured that the necessary resources are in place to ensure that the service is maintained and that they will put maximum resources behind any service failures. The more likely risk is a specific configuration issue with your 365 environment. To mitigate this, Microsoft has  appointed partner companies to assist with migration and ongoing support.

In the event of an outage, it is key that documents and email are available offline. This ensures minimum business disruption. Since all documents are stored in the Cloud, 365 provides maximum Disaster Recovery.