Our firm is currently looking at Office365. We've done a lot of investigating and honestly, it's hard to imagine we won't make the jump. We're still on Office 2007 and Exchange 2007, the hardware supporting our Exchange environment is more than 5 years old and storage is tight, so we're upgrading / migrating one way or another this year. We're already a cloud-friendly firm: we've been scanning and filtering email in the cloud since 1999, we've been using online backup services since 2002, and for the past 7 years we've been on Netdocuments.
There are a lot of ways to analyze the move to Office365:
- Financial - Does the move to a subscription based, hosted model make sense financially? If you're like us, facing a massive on-premise upgrade, migrating to Office365 is an easy case to make for at least 3 - 4 years out. Your CFO might also like Office365 if it allows your firm to convert a chunk of CAPEX budget to OPEX.
- Technical - How does Office365 compare to what you have now? The latest version of Office, 50 Gb mailboxes (our current default is 5 Gb for attorneys and 2 Gb for staff) backup and DR built-in just for starters. Do you currently have an enterprise ready file sharing service? Will Lync be useful in your firm?
- Security - Who invests more heavily in security - your firm or Microsoft? Of course security isn't just about spending. Compliance is a major issue for law firms, and only you can determine if the security in a hosted environment is sufficient for your needs. HIPAA / HITECH is important for us, and Microsoft's willingness to sign a BA agreement is a big plus.
- Religious - If you are committed to doing things the same old way because "that's the way we do it here" or if you view your firm's network and tech services as your own little kingdom and have no intention of letting go of a piece of that kingdom, then Office365 is certainly not for you. In my experience this does not describe the typical ILTA member, but people like this are out there, often heavily armed with fear, uncertainty and budgets.
For small - mid sized firms with limited internal IT resources, Office365 is likely an opportunity to improve the services surrounding a key technology (how many smaller firms have BC/DR support for their on-premise Exchange?) and to add a level of expertise for Exchange server support (patching, upgrading, backups) that may not already exist internally. We use a third party product that gives us local and remote failover for our Exchange servers. That's 8 servers we can turn off after transitioning to Office365.
With Office365, Microsoft is in competition with itself. On the one hand, they want to sell you software licensing to support and upgrade your on-premise Exchange servers. On the other hand, they want to be your strategic partner that extends your IT infrastructure and expertise to a hosted environment. Law firms need to complete the same exercise. From a financial technical, and security standpoint, which offering best meets the needs of the firm and its clients? If there is an inherent objection to the hosted scenario, especially among the IT staff, is it merely religious? Perhaps it's time for a revival.
There can be a downside to Office365. There several options for synchronizing user accounts between Office365 and your internal Active Directory. If you decide to use ADFS and to follow Microsoft's best practices, you'll need 8 new servers. What the server-man giveth, the server man taketh away! Fortunately there are other, less extensive options. The SLA on Office365 is 99.9% - which leaves just under 9 hours per year of potential downtime. How does that compare to what you have now? Lastly, if you are still running a lot of add-ins on your Exchange servers, that will present some challenges.
I’m not a salesperson, but there are a lot of good reasons to consider a move to Office365.