Hi All,
I have a user who runs a small office who is possibly thinking about moving to Office 365.I have been reading some of the posts here and overall they have been very helpful but they haven’t answered all of my questions. I have a few queries below and if anyone could help I would appreciate it. Sorry for the long post but I hoped to get all the questions into one thread.
I’ll give you a brief description of the setup and the way he works currently.
Working Environment
He works from an office in his house when at home but travels internationally working very frequently. When at home he has a Fibre broadband connection but when travelling he uses WiFi when available at hotels etc or otherwise if stuck he uses a 3G Dongle.
His email basically is his business. All of his past documentation and present work is stored in his email and is critical to his working operation. he has a huge store of email, over 30GB. This was stored in one huge PST file but I have split it into several smaller more manageable files recently. He has two separate email addresses which are connected to outlook. He then stores emails from both these addresses into his local pst files.
His pst files are stored on his laptop locally for use offline and online when travelling. These are backed up on a weekly basis to his NAS when he is back in the office.
He will not be moving away from using his email as a “business” store in this fashion.
Hardware
1 x Laptop (1 x Backup Laptop)
1 x NAS
Software
Office 2010
Email Addresses
Home Internet Connection
25MB Fibre Broadband
Connection When Travelling
WiFi When Available
3G Dongle
Why Office 365
I am looking at Office 365 for him as a way of keeping up to date with the latest software and providing some security for his emails and the ability to use anywhere when travelling internationally and also on mobile devices.
Questions
- He has 2 x email addresses with different domains. How will office 365 accommodate this. Will he be able to use both addresses to send/receive from a single mailbox or how is this handled.
- I see the maximum mailbox size is 25 GB. Can this be extended? How and to what limit and to what cost?
- Once a transition to Office 365 is made I will copy his pst files into the mailboxes thus ensuring they are synced to the cloud. Once all his pst’s are synced to the cloud and removed from Outlook will he still have access to his emails when he is offline?. i.e. when he travels and has no Internet Connection will he still be able to browse his emails as he currently can with pst files?
- How long does the free trial last?
- Considering his email addresses are to domains he owns would there be an interruption to being able to send/receive from these accounts during a swapover. i.e. would there be an email “outage” for him?
Thanks in Advance!!