Hi everyone,
First of all, I apologize if I am posting in the incorrect forum.
One of my client is interested into having his emails in the cloud. My client, a small enterprise of 5-6 people, just like most people has iPhones, laptops, tablets and desktop pcs. Because they have multiple devices, and they are using POP3 as email protocol, it is a pain to manage inboxes. For exemple, one inbox is setup over 4 different devices and when someone is doing cleanup, the other employee can't see it because it is POP3. So the principal reason why my client is interested into moving his emails to a centrally managed location ("cloud"), is to get make sure that every emails on each device are synchronized.
I have done few Google researches and the Office 365 Exchange Online plans seems bang on. My client does not require the whole Office suite to be in the cloud, only emails. Before registering to Exchange Online Plan, we have some questions, if you don't mind answering.
- My client has multiple inboxes (info, reception, owner, etc). Some inboxes are associated with a person while other are 'virtuals', such as info@domain.com. The Exchange Online Plan 1 is 4$/user/month. What is considered to be a "user" ? Do virtual inboxes counts as a user ? My guess would be yes, since it is a mailbox on its own and that Exchange does not know if it is virtual or a real person, but I would like to confirm before buying.
- How do we migrate from our current POP3 servers to Exchange Online ? My client's @domain.com MX records point to his website hosting company, which also hosts emails. Do we have to change only the MX records in the DNS to point to Exchange Online servers ? I am wondering if the domain DNS records has to be managed by Microsoft...
- I don't understand In-Place Archive. Is it like "Online Archive" feature from Exchange 2010 ? How much space has the In-Place Archive in the Plan 1 package, since Plan 2 has unlimited ?
- Since my client is using Outlook as main email client, I guess it would be easy to move all his emails from his current POP3 OST file to Exchange Online ? My first guess is I would try to add both accounts (POP3 and Exchange Online) into the same Outlook account and then copy the folders/emails from the POP3 account to the Exchange Online account into Outlook. Is this the correct way to do this ?
- My client is running a small Windows 2012 Essentials domain controller. I read into 2012 that Office 365 can be integrated. Can I manage all the inboxes of the Exchange Online Plan right into the 2012 server dashboard or do I have to do this from Exchange Online website ?
Thank you for your time,
Guillaume.