Since October 2010, Microsoft has allowed a limited number of people to use its Office 365 beta, a cloud-hosted set of Office servers, enabling full use of all Office tools. Office 365 offers multi-tenanted versions of the Office family servers including Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 and Lync 2010.
The idea is not new – organizations have been asking for anywhere, anytime access to applications and services for a long time. Office 365 combines Office, SharePoint, Exchange and Lync in a unified cloud.
Easy to start – When users log in for the first time, users get shortcuts to the key services they want (Outlook Web Access for email and calendar, SharePoint, download to Lync client). There is no need to permanently use these shortcuts; Office 365 van easily be used from desktop tools (e.g., Outlook).
Lync – When using Lync, the whitelist option allows users to lock down conversations with trusted partners. Microsoft is working on enhancing this feature enabling online collaboration in Office 365. Office 365 currently offers IM, VoIP and video chat in the Lync 2010 client, as well as the ability to deliver slides to online meetings.
SharePoint and Exchange – Office 365’s SharePoint and Exchange implementation is straightforward, providing Access, Excel, and InfoPath services. It can also be used for some basic computing and storage. This opens a whole new set of challenges, including migration of existing data to the cloud. As DataMills, we are looking into reducing risks for such transitions.
We would like to conclude by saying that we don’t see Office 365 as a threat to IT professionals at all. Instead, we strongly feel that it will give organizations the tools to expand and also to protect their skilled IT staff from basic administration tasks.
DataMills tackles challenges posed to organizations which move their email data to Google Apps: Automating the collection process of PST files before they get migrated; as well as providing an on-premises backup of the Google Apps email data.
Email cloud services are catching on, and a rising number of enterprises are deciding to move their email services over to Google Apps. This move involves phased data migration processes, which is far more complex than these companies initially expected.
The first daunting challenge associated with such migration, which DataMills solutions meet head-on, is locating and aggregating the Outlook data file (PST).
In most organizations, PST files contain more than 90% of the email and contact data, making it the biggest resource of email data which should be migrated. PST files can be located anywhere on the user’s computer or on the network, and they cannot be simply copied while they are in use by Outlook, which creates a very difficult and time-consuming challenge to aggregate them.
“Our PST Aggregation products provide unique tools that automate the collection of scattered enterprise PST files into a central location”, explained Yoram Barzilai, CEO of DataMills. “This way, migration products such as Google’s GAMME (Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange®) server will be able to seamlessly and automatically migrate the PST files to Google Apps.”
Some organizations, instead of migrating their existing PST files to the cloud, prefer to use our PST aggregation tools for creating a central PST archive for future reference.
These tools enable organizations to achieve substantial savings that could reach hundreds or even thousands of manual work hours associated with such email migration processes, as well as eliminating human errors.
“Another aspect of migrating into the cloud is that some enterprise customers are reluctant to completely surrender their email data without having a local copy”, says Yoram Barzilai. “For those customers that continue to use Outlook as their email client, our EdgeSafe PST2PST Backup solution should reduce this concern, by enabling them to keep a local copy of their data in central on-premises location.
This backup copy will be seamlessly synchronized with the Google Apps email (email contacts, calendar, etc.) data in an efficient incremental manner and will be stored in a standard PST file format which can be shuttled and immediately used by Outlook.”
For more information or for a free demo please contact DataMills at:
http://www.DataMills.com/form/contact-us
About DataMills
DataMills develops and sells products for the enterprise for backing up workstation data, including PST files and other files and folders, as well as products helping organizations to tackle challenges posed to them when they are migrating email data into the cloud.
http://www.datamills.com
©Copyright 2004-2010. DataMills Ltd. and its affiliates and subsidiaries.
The DataMills technology and/or products and/or software described are protected by registered and/or pending patents including U.S. Patent No.7,536,424 B2 and may be protected by other U.S. Patents, foreign patents, or pending applications. DataMills, DataMills logo, EdgeSafe PST2PST Backup, EdgeSafe File Backup Agent, EdgeSafe Control Station, EdgeSafe PST2PST Migrator are trademarks or registered trademarks of DataMills Ltd. All other trademarks are the trademarks of their respective owners.
