Office 365
When the IT-guys at the other branch offices started talking about the Microsoft cloud stuff, some 7 years ago, I was not thrilled. I kind of felt I had finally gotten to a point where things where stable. The VMs were running smoothly. The exchange environment didn’t fall over daily, but only once every couple of months, there was a web interface available, and email clients on the phones were finally starting work ok, with push notifications and what-not. And for those pesky services tucked away behind the perimeter firewall, you could just easily fire up the VPN-client and access them! Well not from the phone, but who in their right mind need to access work stuff from their phones!? I don’t need no stinkin’ cloud!
Exchange
I felt Azure (Windows Azure back then) was just out of the question. I saw absolutely no need for it, and neither did the developers in the Swedish branch, since they finally had what they needed regarding compute resources. But after months of nagging from the other IT-guys, I started to cave. At least regarding Office 365. The Danish branch IT-manager had a lot of IT-people on staff at the time and a couple of them were real die-hard Microsoft fanboys, while I, having been swayed by the compact hatred for Microsoft among the Swedish developers, was more on the negative side. I suggested we’d investigate alternatives to Microsoft all together. Why not go OSS? The other IT-guys laughed in my face. Well not my actual face since we were on a Lync meeting.
I kind of agreed it would be nice to not have to care about hosting an Exchange environment (Self-hosted Exchange is just a fucking nightmare, oh how I loathe Microsoft for inflicting that abomination of a system upon the world). And since the Danes offered to do all the heavy lifting, leaving just a little point-and-click migration to me, I finally accepted. And I was quietly looking forward to not having to expose myself to any more of the crap put forward in documentation from MS, like for example this screenshot from the classic “Planning Your Implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server White Paper” back from the party year of 1999, full of incoherent drivel.
Implementation/migration
Exchange was the major pain point, and the focus of attention. We also sported an on-prem Lync setup (well at least the other branches did, the Swedes had never bothered to use it), but Lync was at that point not available in Office 365, so therefore not part of the migration. I was not involved in the nitty-gritty details of the migration, but I noticed a lot of new MS infrastructure services was put up in order to facilitate the migration (we needed to go via a hybrid environment in order to, at a later stage, go full office cloud, and the hybrid approached demanded like 10 servers on its own!). Also a lot of effort went into going through licensing and transferring our on-prem, perpetual kind of license deal for the office suite, into its cloud counterpart. This is not an easy task in itself, Microsoft making sure it’s as difficult as possible to understand in which way they are shafting you.
While I was relaxing in the backseat arms crossed, the Danes and their consultants flurried about, making it all ready for the grand finale: the migration. And I must confess. It was a great success! It went very smoothly, and I don’t remember any down-time at all. And especially, I was pleased with not having to do any of the risk taking nor heavy lifting!
Conclusion
Well now, almost 7 years later, I can safely say it was the right thing to do! I have never looked back (except in horror) on the OnPrem setup of Exchange/Lync/Office. Sure, we still have traces of the old exchange environment (there’s a windows 2008 CAS server that no one dares to touch), and sure, we’ll need the synch server as long as we have an OnPrem AD. But we’re planning to finally demote the ADFS servers completely, now that all services have support for Azure AD auth. If we could just remove the CAS server, we’d be almost rid of all traces of our old MS OnPrem Setup! Well, except for the thousands of old, unused AD Attributes created by Exchange and Lync, imprinted in eternity like prison tattoos.
As for Office 365, it has really evolved in the right direction. All the new services coming, such as Teams, Planner, Forms, PowerApps and whatnot are really interesting. And some even useful. And since the dethroning of Ballmer and rise of Nadella, the developers no longer hate Microsoft as much. That’s good. Because Microsoft is not going anywhere soon. They hold the Nordics in a firm, iron grip.
The personal experiences, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this blog post are my own and in no way represent those of the company.