SaaS - Exchange and Sharepoint

Annes

People at my company hate working with Sharepoint and Exchange. Setting it up, patching it, upgrading it, troubleshooting it. We just want to control the accounts. Does anyone have any experience with hosted Sharepoint and/or Exchange? Any suggestions would be rad.

Cyclonite

We're in the process of moving to Office 365 for Exchange. We're just before the point of moving test accounts from our on-premise solution to the cloud. I'll let you know how it goes.

To this point, the initial config has kinda sucked, but it's not MS's fault. We have about 105 SMTP domains, 32 AD domains (single forest), and the AD domains don't match the primary SMTP addresses on user accounts. This has required a lot of prep work.

I had to add all the primary SMTP domains as alternate UPN suffixes for the forest and I'm working with each core company to make the appropriate adjustments. Additionally, I have to register EVERY one of these domains on the 365 side. This requires running a PowerShell command, grabbing the required DNS TXT record and creating it within DNS, waiting a few hours for propagation, then verifying the domain. One hundred five times.

That's been the painful part. It's easy, but it's tedious. I'm assuming (hoping) you don't have nearly as many domains to deal with. If you have one or two, it's far easier.

Now, the important pieces you'll need if you move to 365 if you have an AD domain and want to have single sign on: 2+ (redundancy) ADFS servers, 2+ (redundancy) ADFS proxies (MS TMG for instance, or just the ADFS proxy application if you don't have a need for something as big as TMG), an Exchange 2010 hybrid server to facilitate moving mailboxes between on-premise and cloud.

If your AD domain isn't capable of being an externally resolvable DNS domain (for instance, if it ends in .local), you'll have to adjust your UPN suffixes.

At any point, you can enable or disable Exchange, Lync, or SharePoint services for a particular domain, so once you get the initial infrastructure in place for one, the rest will be easy to adjust for.

If you have the ability to get a Microsoft PFE to take a look at your environment and work with you to get things going, it'll help you tremendously. There's so many little caveats here and there. Though if you've got a smart team and aren't being rushed, they'll be able to figure everything out.