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Right Guys,

I’m just about to take the plunge and go for O365 E3 plan, we are mainly going to be using it to utilise local copies of the latest office / exchange / SharePoint and the personal storage that each person gets.

Just wondered if there is anything I should look out for in terms of potential issues or anything I can do to make the move smooth !

A few specific questions I have are :

1/ Is there a good tool to enable me to add Save to locations in the office apps for local users to be able to save back to their respective one drive locations / shared SharePoint libraries etc.

2/ Has anyone ever used InfoSec cloud for the subscription as opposed to going direct to Microsoft ? Their prices are very competitive but I’ve never used them

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At least for Number 1, install the OneDrive for Business app and it will sync a folder for you. In the Office programs just save it directly to there and it will sync up.

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We are on the E3 plan.

One Drive for business is pretty ropey we find that if you put things in your one drive over 10-15GB you’ll get quite a few sync errors where you have to constantly repair your cache. You cannot put files larger than 2GB on the it as the Architecture it is built on (sharepoint) cannot handle that size files.

Quite a few patches were released to resolve one drive for business issues around September time and that stabilised things a fair amount.

Bar that we are pretty happy with everything else, we use DirSync to our AD FS system for 800+ staff. seems to be pretty stable, you see a few service statuses about issues but we have only been effected by 1 and that was short lived.

We use Azure aswell which again is pretty stable (not sure if the Azure and 365 are sharing the same datacenters or not).

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You can always go on the E1 plan which is free for educational entities and then test it before making a financial commitment.

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ideally I want to avoid this due to bandwidth but mainly we have roaming profiles and I dont want these getting full of personal data, yet I want people to be able to use it for personal data if that makes sense?

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thanks for that, I was not aware that you could not store files over 2GB, that is good to know :slight_smile: I think Im going to use DirSync without AD FS as ive heard people have had nightmares with it.

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I didn’t set it up so I cant comment on that side of things but actual use. Its so straight forward and works without issue tbh.

We have 2 ADFS servers with 2 ADFS proxies.

You do have to be very anal about your AD and the way things are configured but again - i came into a environment where this was already in place so I don’t know what configuration nightmares there intially were.

We also use some teamsites for DR, as they are remote we store our DR documents in a teamsite with both 365 only accounts and AD accounts. So that it is always available.

These can also be sync’d with your one drive and can appear as a shared drive type location which is pretty useful.

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Im currently sifting through a whole world of S**** with AD trying to get it all organised/tidy and relevant before doing the switch as I inherited a whole world of pain !

What do you mean by using team sites for DR ?

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We have X amount of space for sharepoint online which comes under the 365 package.

We upload contact infomation and other information to this site so should our entire enviroment go down we can still get access to this.

With DirSync and ADFS - if your ADFS system is down and you dont have a copy of your AD in the cloud (we are doing that this year) then you’ll not be able to authtenicate against Outlook or any 365 offering. (Until we move our AD to the cloud we have also created ‘cloud only accounts’ that have permissions to the same teamsites).

We also use teamsites to move some of our intranet away from Domino (the system we migrated from). And Yammer as our company intranet.

Very 365 orientated.

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Sorry Teamsites would also be sharepoint libraries as you’ve put it… The type of sharepoint site we use is a teamsite.

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ahhhh ok yes i get what you mean now, i think we may look at that also at some point but im trying to take small steps with O365 to get people buy into the whole cloud thing lol

What do you use yamma for ? We are looking to have our intranet done in sharepoint also as one of the first steps, is yamma just the MS social side of sharepoint ?

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You don’t want to use ADFS unless you need it for something. DirSync will work for the vast majority of companies by itself. ADFS puts more potential failpoints in the system (especially if you don’t have it redundantly set up) and more complexity.

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We use yammer as a company intranet/facebook type system. There are job posting sections/team building sections. Its mainly used for internal communication that doesn’t need a email.

We use AD FS for a number of different appliances. So you may not require it yourself.

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do you use Lync ? if so how does this work for you as a method of instant communication ?

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Yes we replaced sametime (domino) with Lync.

Works fine, we also have a number of conference rooms which are all being converted to use lync as its primary conferencing software.

It has some minor issues, but its like Skype (and soon to be renamed skype for business)

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Thanks for all your help guys, really appreciate it.

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OneDrive is constantly evolving, the maximum file size you can upload is being increase to 10GB, the storage limit of 1TB is also being made unlimited!

http://blogs.office.com/2014/10/27/onedrive-now-unlimited-storage-office-365-subscribers/