Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

Bulk create the users in BPOS

Jeff Chia — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:20:08 GMT

For small organizations we can use an Excel spreadsheet with a list of all 15 users to bulk create the users in BPOS. then use the mail migration tool or just have the users save their current mailbox with everything as a PST file and load in into Outlook once they sign in to their BPOS account.

re: Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

mhass — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:10:35 GMT

Thanks for the post Jeff, but setting up an org is a one time event as you describe, and is tolerable.

DirSync would allow the Small Business customer to continue to provision users in their AD (actually recommeneded in the MS Online docs) which is then synced to MS Online. Since most small businesses want to minimize the admin overhead, having to create an account in both places is not ideal.

re: Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

Jeff Chia — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:32:27 GMT

As we both agree, if the customer is getting rid of their enviroment totally then my suggestion probably would work fine.

Perhaps the product team can incorporate running dirSync on a DC requirement in the next version.

For now, if the customer plans to keep SBS around for many good reasons then I would suggest running a member server in a Virtual Machine just for Dirsync. It might seem to be an overkill but the benefits of having mail, AV/spam filtering, document collaboration, presence and web conferencing available on the web, on their laptop, home and on their mobile device is definitely less work managing without a single point of failure using BPOS.

I think if going BPOS makes business and investment sense to justify the extra configuration.

re: Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

mhass — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:36:53 GMT

BPOS is still an amazing investment and this business will definately go there in about 3 weeks. The reason to keeping SBS around is for WSUS patching and AV managment, not to mention they use it as VPN for a Unix based app they have.

I thought of standing up a VPC with Windows 2003/2008, but from a licensing standpoint that is another $2000 for them.

The point of this blog was to let SBS owners know that it won't be all rainbows and unicorns if they go the BPOS route.