Sponsored Post: Office 365 Does A LOT – But Not Everything.

small island for the last year, Office 365 is a robust cloud-based office automation solution that combines conventional desktop productivity, email, instant messaging, telephony and content management solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Microsoft touts the “native archiving” functionality in O365, but the Osterman report echoes the findings of other observers, who have pointed out several scenarios in which their archiving implementation may not be sufficient for certain use cases.

Obviously, no one should expect that a mass-marketed solution would meet every need of every user in every circumstance. Microsoft offers many permutations of the O365 service, and retail price points range from $2.00/month to more than $20. The feature set obviously varies among these offerings, and anyone considering migrating to O365 would do well to consider their options carefully. Layering in application services like archiving might be a wise choice especially if:

1. Fast and flexible search is a primary consideration for archiving.
2. LDAP (not Active Directory) is the primary authentication method.
3. Customers don’t wish to pay ‘extra’ for encryption or file protection.
4. Microsoft datasets are only one component of the data management problem you’re hoping to address with a cloud-based archiving solution, as heterogeneous environments are not best addressed with a ‘pure’ O365 implementation.

Several other limitations around archiving and security are pointed out in the Osterman Report, which can be found here:

www.ostermanresearch.com/whitepapers/download191.htm

It should be noted that Microsoft has an excellent and affordable solution set within O365 – it just might not meet every need, and as trusted IT advisors to your clients, you need to know the whole story.