On Wednesday 12th September Suite exhibited at the Hutt Valley Business Expo. Our team enjoyed the opportunity to meet with other SMEs to discuss their IT needs. We were inundated with questions about what business in the cloud was all about… here are a few of the most popular questions answered.
What’s this Cloud thing?
**From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
At Suite we sell Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud computing platform. It is secure, anywhere access to email and calendars, Office Web Apps, instant messaging, conferencing, and file sharing. At Suite we help you to set it up and support it on going.
Office 365 offers so much see below…
Microsoft Exchange Online is email, calendar, and contacts software delivered as a cloud service, hosted by Microsoft. The service is based on Microsoft Exchange server and offers 25 GB of email storage per user.
Microsoft SharePoint Online is a collaboration, sharing, and document editing service using internal and external sites. It can also be used to create public-facing Web sites
Microsoft Lync Online provides communications features including presence information, instant messaging, PC-to-PC audio/video calling and online meetings that can include PC audio, video and web conferencing with application sharing, whiteboards, and other collaboration tools.
Office Professional Plus provides the same client software as the Office Professional Plus product available through Microsoft Volume Licensing.
Office Web Apps are browser-based versions of Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint that enable viewing and lightweight editing of Office documents in Web browsers while preserving the formatting of the original documents.
How much email storage do I get? Are there any limits?
You get lots and it’s cheap it does depend on what plan you purchase from Microsoft. See below for the differences between the plans.
Exchange Online Mailbox Size Limits
The amount of mailbox storage available to a user is determined by his or her user subscription license:
- Each Exchange Online Kiosk user receives 1 GB of mailbox storage. The maximum mailbox size for a Kiosk user is 1 GB.
- Each Exchange Online (Plan 1) user receives 25 GB of mailbox storage, which can be split between the user’s primary mailbox and the user’s personal archive.
- Each Exchange Online (Plan 2) user receives 25 GB of storage in the user’s primary mailbox. The maximum size of the primary mailbox is 25 GB. The user also receives unlimited storage in the user’s personal archive (see the personal archive section below).
Personal Archive
Exchange Online provides built-in archiving capabilities, including a personal archive that gives users a convenient place to store older emails. A personal archive is a specialized mailbox that appears alongside users’ primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App. Users can access the archive in the same way they access their primary mailboxes. In addition, users can search both their personal archives and primary mailboxes.
But I use Chrome will I be able to access my mailbox online?
Outlook Web App is the program you use to access your emails online is supported with full functionality on the following browsers:
- Internet Explorer 7 and later versions
- Firefox 3 or higher
- Safari 3 or higher on Macintosh OS X 10.5
- Chrome 3 and later versions
How much storage is there for my documents and content?
SharePoint Online (where you store your data and content) allocates an initial 10 GB of storage plus 500 MB for each user. This storage is pooled and available for allocation across multiple site collections. For example, an organization of 10 users by default would have a base of 15 MB of storage.
In addition, users can purchase more SharePoint Online storage in GB increments charged monthly.
The maximum SharePoint Online storage available to a single company’s tenancy is up to 25 terabytes (TB).
But I have a file server and that works fine why should I change anything?
A good time to consider moving to the cloud is when you reach storage capacity on your server or require a new server. If you add up all of the costs to maintain that server and your employees PCs and software you might be surprised how much money you will save.
Example scenario:
Small Business Server (SBS) – Server cost $9,000 then there is sometimes the additional costs for the following services:
- Anti-Spam Systems
- Anti-virus solutions
- Disaster Recovery
- Firewall Solutions
- Network Maintenance Plans
- Online Backup
- Secure Remote access
- Voice Conferencing – bridge conferencing solution
- Server monitoring and Support
With Office 365 and Suite support your costs are fixed per user per month.
Want to find out how much you will save by taking your business to the cloud?
Suite will help to find the right Office 365 plan for your business… we offer a FREE one hour cloud computing health check for you to find out how much it will cost to take your Business to the cloud…we will meet with you at your office, listen to your business requirements and deliver a personalised proposal.
