What to do when it’s time to upgrade emaildocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_13x/io_136428/item_1504483/What...2 WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S TIME TO UPGRADE EMAIL In this handbook: An Exchange

What to do when it’s time to upgrade email

FEBRUARY 2017DATA CENTER HANDBOOK

FO

TO

LIA

2 WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S TIME TO UP GRADE EMAIL

In this handbook:

An Exchange upgrade isn’t your only option for email

Email options: Upgrade Exchange or go another way?

Five Exchange 2016 migration best practices

Beware of these six Office 365 cons for IT shops accustomed to on premises

DATA CENTER HANDBOOK


PHIL SWEENEY

Running a business entails many things, but how many of those things are

absolutely required? Other than a staff, which essential elements need to

be in place? More than a building or a product or a coffee budget, a business

needs email. The lowly email remains a form of oxygen for any endeavor, be it a

startup or a global enterprise.

For most of the past few decades, an Exchange upgrade was how businesses

kept that vital resource functioning. One iteration of Microsoft’s Exchange

Server was followed by another. Migration led to migration, and Outlook

mailboxes sent and received the messages that got things done. For the most

part, it worked just fine.

Options now exist that can make the obligatory Exchange upgrade a thing of

the past. Realistic -- and appealing -- alternatives are part of the conversation

more than ever before. These options have changed an IT team’s analysis from


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when to shift to a new version of Exchange to whether to bother at all.

This handbook looks at Exchange -- the latest version of which appeared in

late 2015 -- as well the other ways an organization can provide email services.

Microsoft’s Office 365 platform continues to gain momentum, offering a range

of services while eliminating an organization’s need to maintain on-premises

Exchange. At the same time, Office 365 raises new concerns. Organizations

will want to consider Office 365’s implications on things like licensing and

resiliency.

An organization that’s unsure about another Exchange upgrade might even

choose to look at email services outside of the Microsoft portfolio. There will

certainly be pros and cons, as there always are, to whatever path is chosen.

The essential thing is to keep the email flowing.


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PAUL KORZENIOWSKI

In the 1990s, when the first internet transmission protocols were in their

embryonic stages, Microsoft Exchange burst onto the IT scene. In the years

since, the Exchange and Outlook powerhouse has served as the hub of

business communication. Now, with so many more email options to choose

from, it’s reasonable to wonder if Exchange’s dominance has begun to wane.

Organizations deployed Exchange servers to enable employees to easily

move information from place to place. Through the decades, firms upgraded

their mail servers every three to five years. As cloud and other hosted email

options became more appealing, businesses began to examine, and in many

cases move to, outsourced alternatives.

“The industry has reached an inflection point where many companies are

looking at moving their Exchange systems off site,” said Ramakant Pandrangi,

vice president and general manager of Microsoft Clouds and Cloud Office at


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Rackspace.

Email remains a primary -- and growing -- means of business communication.

Worldwide spending on email topped $13.6 billion in 2015 and is expected to

grow to more than $38.9 billion by 2019, an average compound annual growth

rate of 30%, according to market research firm The Radicati Group.

BEARING A HEAVY BURDEN

The continued reliance on this communication channel has meant that IT staffs

have been charged with regularly upgrading Exchange.

For a variety of reasons, the task has become more onerous recently. More

messages require more storage, and curbing email growth is challenging. An IT

team will sometimes issue an ultimatum to users and require that they reduce

the size of their mailboxes. But deleted messages can conflict with compliance

regulations, which aim to have organizations store more information for longer

periods of time.

In addition, employees have become more mobile in recent years. Rather

than support a workforce with Windows systems, IT must work with a variety


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of handheld devices and synch them to Exchange mailboxes, calendars

and contacts. Consequently, upgrading the email server has become more

complex, requiring more time, effort and money.

This effort is complicated further by the struggle IT managers face when trying

to secure funding. Gartner expects IT spending to grow by just 2.7% in 2017,

and a mundane task such as keeping the email system functional often isn’t

going to be a priority -- especially when executives are more willing to put cash

into high-profile, business-changing projects, like big data and the internet of

things.

Corporations do have choices if they want to reduce their Exchange

maintenance costs, and it’s prudent to periodically review the email options.

One possibility is moving to lower-cost, sometimes free, email services. Low-

cost and no-cost systems come from vendors like Amazon Web Services,

GoDaddy, Google, IBM, Intermedia, Rackspace and Yahoo. These offerings

often rely on web interfaces, making them easy to use, and setup is generally

quick. Still, they often lack sophistication. Features used for discovery during

a legal proceeding or integration with collaboration applications are notably

weak.


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FINDING A GREAT HOST

An organization that sticks with Exchange can outsource maintenance

to a third party. In a hosted service, the client hands daily maintenance --

troubleshooting, upgrading, patching, etc. -- of its Exchange servers to a

vendor. Hosted options come from many suppliers, including AppRiver, Apptix,

Ceryx, FuseMail, Go Daddy, Intermedia, Microsoft, mindSHIFT, Navisite,

Rackspace, SherWeb and SilverSky.

Hosted services come in two flavors. A dedicated system takes the

on-premises system and plops it down into a provider’s data center.

The customer can tailor the service, such as adding interfaces to other

applications, as it chooses. A shared system, meanwhile, runs more than one

client’s email system on one server. Shared systems are usually less expensive,

but they are sometimes are viewed as less secure and less customizable than

dedicated services.

Cloud computing has become a significant player in the email market. While

on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server deployments account for the

majority of worldwide Exchange mailboxes, many organizations are planning


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to move email to the cloud. In fact, a Gartner survey found that 78% of

businesses are using or plan to use cloud versions of Exchange.

This shift is more complex than changing email servers. “Email systems have a

lot of complexity,” said Adam Preset, a research director at Gartner. “Running

them is often much harder than it seems.”

Microsoft offers cloud Exchange services as part of the Office 365 business

productivity suite. So, as businesses adopt the platform, users receive web

versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word. In addition, many firms have tied their

email systems into calendaring, collaboration, conferencing and customer

relationship management systems. Moving such items to the cloud can be a

challenge. Services are generic, so vendors often charge extra for such links.

Cloud providers offer various backup, archiving and recovery services.

Customer concerns start with the server redundancy. Will the system be up

99.999% of the time, which translates to five minutes of downtime a year?

Microsoft and other vendors have built gigantic data centers geared to

improved system availability. To make a sound decision about backup, there

are a series of important questions to ask:


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■■ How often will backups occur?

■■ Where is email information stored?

■■ What are the processes for retrieving it, and how quickly can information

be restored if needed?

With compliance regulations changing, companies need to take a close look at

those issues with their compliance and legal experts to find the best solution

for their organization.

Increasingly, businesses have decided to consider their off-premises email

options. While the potential benefits of an Exchange alternative -- be it Office

365 or a non-Microsoft service -- are significant, a move shouldn’t be made

in haste. After all, email remains a key productivity tool. Imagine trying to do

business without it.


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TAYLA HOLMAN

Microsoft released the newest version of Exchange Server in October 2015.

Exchange 2016 was designed to simplify coexistence with legacy versions of

Exchange, but Microsoft also made collaboration a priority with improvements

to public folders, shared mailboxes and document sharing.

These expert tips can help guide administrators through an Exchange 2016

migration, including preferred architecture, load balancing and topology

requirements.

WHAT TO CONSIDER BEFORE MIGRATING TO EXCHANGE 2016

With mainstream support for Exchange 2010 ending in 2015, many

organizations that are still using the older version should consider migrating to

Exchange 2016. There are five essential areas, including client software, which

should be prioritized to ensure a smooth transition.


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EXCHANGE 2016 INSTALLATION GUIDELINES

There are six guidelines to be aware of when planning an Exchange

2016 deployment, including load balancing and topology requirements.

Organizations should also take note of forest and domain functional level

requirements.

EXCHANGE 2016 PREFERRED ARCHITECTURE

All organizations planning an Exchange 2016 migration need to focus on

three key areas when designing their Exchange environment, based on the

Exchange team’s preferred architecture guidelines.

MIGRATING PUBLIC FOLDERS TO EXCHANGE 2016

Public folders experienced a resurgence with the release of Exchange 2013,

and Microsoft improved the feature in Exchange 2016. Be aware of the benefits

and risks of moving public folders to Exchange 2016 before your organization

starts the migration.


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HOW AN EXCHANGE 2016 DEPLOYMENT WILL BE EASIER

Exchange 2016 can coexist with previous versions of Exchange without

waiting for an update, but that’s just one way an Exchange 2016 deployment

will be different from its predecessors.


REDA CHOUFFANI

IT departments will willingly give up the maintenance and support of email

servers if it means they can focus on delivering value-add services for end

users and customers. Does Office 365 fit the bill?

Microsoft promotes Office 365’s ability to assist in that effort by enabling IT

to eliminate a number of on-premises services. All they have to do is entrust

Microsoft to run these services. But as IT decision makers make the case for


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what the platform can do for them, others have concluded that a number of

Office 365 cons will create problems for services like Exchange, SharePoint

and Skype for Business. So the question remains around some potential Office

365 cons and how to dodge these pitfalls.

Office 365 can do more in 2017 than even two years ago. The platform has

matured and includes a significantly higher number of features, such as Data

Loss Protection, Office Groups, eDiscovery and Planner. The most important

question is if cloud-based Office 365 does a better job than its on-premises

equivalent -- regardless of how many interesting features it offers.

NO CONTROL OVER OFFICE 365 UPTIME

Some IT executives who have not yet adopted the platform express concerns

around uptime and what to do if the platform goes down, or they lose

connectivity to the service. With on-premises Exchange deployment, the

Exchange team can provide a detailed definition of what caused the outage

and the estimated time to recovery.

“If our emails in Office 365 go down, who do I call to complain? And what do


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I tell our executives when they ask when the emails will be back online?” IT

executives may ask. These are valid concerns, and apply to any as a service

offering. The IT team is not in control of an outage or how the outage is

resolved, which is one of many inherent Office 365 cons. On the other hand,

Microsoft reported 99.99% uptime in the third quarter of 2016. That can be

reassuring compared to on-premises uptime at an IT shop.

EMAIL BACKUPS END AT 30 DAYS

Office 365 does not offer backup for email messages beyond 30 days: Any

deleted emails, mailboxes or content more than a month old will be gone.

Since it’s unsettling or even outside of compliance for an enterprise to protect

emails for only 30 days, IT departments must partner with third-party backup

providers to address this gap. Do not mistake resiliency and uptime for backup,

or be prepared to face data loss. Data protection and availability products such

as Veeam Software, AvePoint and Spanning Backup for Office 365 by Dell

EMC all address this Office 365 con.


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RESILIENCY AND UPTIME DON’T EQUAL CONNECTIVITY

Several early adopters noted issues with the data connectivity that offices

have to Office 365. The platform relies heavily on the reliability of the internet

connection for its end users. If a site does not have redundant internet

connectivity, they’ll experience serious trouble if the primary internet line goes

out.

Bandwidth also creates issues. Office 365 requires a specific amount of

bandwidth, calculated based on the number of users in an office. If upload and

download speeds don’t meet the minimum requirements, expect unhappy

users dealing with delayed attachments and email downloads.

LICENSES CAN GET OUT OF CONTROL

Office 365 comes in various flavors for different types of subscribers. Poor

license planning leads to enterprises significantly overpaying for user

subscriptions.

Each of the categories for enterprises and small businesses come with a set

of services bundled under few sets of prices. Some of the options deliver


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Office 365 ProPlus, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and few other

productivity tools that can be installed locally; other packages offer individual

services such as Exchange Online or SharePoint Online only.

Some users need only a minimum set of services, but IT organizations might

license packages without evaluating the types of user profiles they have.

For example, some corporate roles only need access to email and a web-

based email client, which the Kiosk plan satisfies. The Enterprise 1 (E1) plan is

overkill. The difference in cost can range anywhere from $4 to $6 per user per

month. Assign hundreds of users to unnecessarily rich licenses, and the cost

becomes significant.

OFFICE 365 KICKS YOU OUT OF THE SANDBOX

Centralized administration sounds more like an Office 365 pro than con, but

it can lead to damaging accidents. The luxury of having a sandbox to apply

configuration changes is gone once IT moves to Office 365. An administrator

with on-premises Exchange Server can take a snapshot of the server and

apply modifications to it to test the effects before performing these actions

in production. In Office 365, it’s easy to make a mistake that is hard to fix.


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Modifications to email policies and data loss prevention rules cannot be

undone, nor can user changes. IT shops can mitigate this major Office 365 con

with the appropriate change management policy and adequate training on the

platform.

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS TOO MUCH CHOICE

More features and options can lead to poor adoption and even mass confusion.

Don’t put in place new features without forethought. For example, a group of IT

representatives in a large legal firm agreed to hold back several new features

until a committee decided on value, planning and training. This firm relied on

application support, systems administration, security and compliance and

enterprise content delivery to evaluate new features before the IT leadership

made decisions.

Most organizations face challenges because they do not take appropriate

steps to adequately train teams on the full capabilities and administration

of Office 365. Microsoft offers numerous resources to explain the platform

and how to administer it, or IT teams may decide that formal training is not

necessary.

Documents

What to do when it’s time to upgrade emaildocs.media.bitpipe.com/io_13x/io_136428/item_1504483/What...2 WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S TIME TO UPGRADE EMAIL In this handbook: An Exchange