SBS Essentials

Bring up the topic of Office 365 to partners and you get the elephant in the room problem.  Partners don’t want to sell Office 365 because of it’s low margins, of the low amount you get back per seat and the biggie – the elephant – the fact that they don’t bill the customer – Microsoft does. So Microsoft gets the revenue first and later on cuts a check to the partner.  Yet when that cloud goes down or there are issues – guess who they call – the partner.  So they’d rather sell a hosted Exchange product that is more revenue stream and more importantly control and support.

The big thing in my view is not so much the issue of billing – which is a biggie in and of itself – but that of support.   If you go with the recommended Small Business bundle your support is not at the end of a phone call but in a forum.  Not a good SLA for you the partner.

Then I’d highly highly recommend that you sign up for the cloud essentials and kick the tires here.  You realize pretty quickly that there are things that you may be used to in premises that is just not there yet in the hosted/multi tenant version.

For example take this image –

Take a look at the things not yet in online that we take for granted in premise Exchange (and apologies for the grainy color but I snipped it from a Teched video this morning).  Outlook 2003 that can be done with Exchange 2010 isn’t supported with Exchange online.  Public folders.  A biggie.  Server side code.

Get the idea that you’ll still be needed after everything moves to the cloud?  Not to mention you’ll want to think in terms of building offline backups.  Don’t assume that just because the marketing folks say the cloud doesn’t have issue that it won’t have issues.  It will.  Plan on it.  When you are all premise, you build backup solutions taking the data offsite.  Now that you are looking to cloud solutions, plan on building backups that move the backup of the data onsite. 

So be prepared when looking at Exchange online and compare the things you know how to do in premise and you may have to come up with other solutions or third party solutions in the cloud.