Office 365 question

grumpycrab

A friend is going for Office 365 Business across all his devices (windows + apple); as a one-man band he has his own domain email (provided by 1&1 I believe) and its currently set up as IMAP.

The question :- what's the best (not necessarily the cheapest, despite this being MSE) way to sync contacts, calendar? Is it just a case of adding his email account to Outlook?

bengalknights

The best method is literally set the email server to be linked to 365 and use the outlook exchange server on Outlook as the client

The exchange server will sync across all devices its setup to

grumpycrab

Thanks. So Exchange Server wins over IMAP. Is that because of the synch features (contacts, calendar et al) and because its "business class".

The domain (email) is provided by 1&1, currently using IMAP. Do we add Exchange hosting with 1&1 OR add Exchange to the 365 package (yes, I've been out of server email for a while...)

Jivesinger

I don't claim to know much about this - but it looks like the 1&1 product with Calendar and ActiveSync etc. is here and £4.99/month/mailbox (cheaper if more than 5 mailboxes):
http://www.1and1.co.uk/email-hosting

I think the pricing of the Office 365 version will depend on which product it's combined with - for instance if the aim was to have desktop Office software, then it looks like an extra 80p per month to add Exchange.
https://products.office.com/en-GB/business/compare-office-365-for-business-plans

The Office 365 version of Exchange on its own is £2.50 per user per month.
https://products.office.com/en-gb/exchange/exchange-online

I've used the Exchange part of Office 365 and it works with my own domain, and syncs my Calendar.

grumpycrab

Thanks. Ignoring the cost (for now) Exchange looks the way to go. Not sure if we want to keep email/Exchange hosting with 1&1 though - heard poorish feedback. Guess we could redirect the domain to another hoster (e.g. Microsoft).

AJXX

grumpycrab wrote: »

Thanks. Ignoring the cost (for now) Exchange looks the way to go. Not sure if we want to keep email/Exchange hosting with 1&1 though - heard poorish feedback. Guess we could redirect the domain to another hoster (e.g. Microsoft).

You'll get that on both sides. I've had the unfortunate task through the years of managing some O365 accounts and lets just say the support MS provides for O365 can be "testing".

Often I've had tickets go unreplied to for several days and when asked why given a range of questionable excuses such as "we tried calling on x at x time" - That's nice, perhaps you could have updated the ticket to reflect that you tried to call me once, 3 days ago, from a withheld number and didn't leave a message...

The best excuse was when I raised a complaint over a ticket which had sat unreplied to for 10 whole days and that was basically "sorry we're overwhelmed after a recent successful marketing campaign" That's fantastic! How about you support existing customers though?

When they do reply to a ticket it can be poor and seem like they haven't even read the description of the issue.

Not trying to put you off, but if you read up on any sort of sysadmin form they'll tell you the same thing. The actual product itself is fantastic and I highly recommend it - but when it goes wrong the support can be awful.

Fightsback

grumpycrab wrote: »

A friend is going for Office 365 Business across all his devices (windows + apple)

Which version of business are they looking at Grumpy ?

I_have_spoken

A friend is going for Office 365 Business across all his devices (windows + apple)

As it's an allowable expense against income, I'd go with Office 365
Business Premium which gives Email/calendar with 50 GB mailbox on Exchange online hosted by Microsoft, which all the Office apps will sync with.

Guess we could redirect the domain to another hoster

1&1 should assist in setting the name servers for the domain to send emails to Microsoft Exchange Online

grumpycrab

Fightsback wrote: »

Which version of business are they looking at Grumpy ?

I_have_spoken wrote: »

As it's an allowable expense against income, I'd go with Office 365
Business Premium which gives Email/calendar with 50 GB mailbox ...

Thanks for the comments. Was going to suggest he gets Office 365 Business Standard version (without a mailbox as he's already got it with 1&1.)
May change the way we look at this - and suggest he first migrates from IMAP to Exchange at 1&1. This includes Outlook 2013 (I assume on as many workstations as needed) which, I believe, does all the contacts/calendar sync.
http://www.1and1.co.uk/microsoft-exchange
Then worry about Office...

Jivesinger

grumpycrab wrote: »

Thanks for the comments. Was going to suggest he gets Office 365 Business Standard version (without a mailbox as he's already got it with 1&1.)
May change the way we look at this - and suggest he first migrates from IMAP to Exchange at 1&1. This includes Outlook 2013 (I assume on as many workstations as needed) which, I believe, does all the contacts/calendar sync.
http://www.1and1.co.uk/microsoft-exchange
Then worry about Office...

As I understand it the Office 365 Business includes installations of Office desktop apps (including Outlook) on 5 PCs per user, so if he did end up with that, the 1&1 Outlook wouldn't be so much of a benefit.

Edit: but assuming it's easy to cancel the 1&1 Exchange with a month's notice, it may be a good step towards where he wants to end up. For me it would depend on how critical it was to have MS Office (as opposed to LibreOffice or whatever).