Exchange Online Moving to Office 365

Exchange Online, a Microsoft-hosted messaging and collaboration service based on Exchange Server, will become part of Office 365 (currently in beta) when the new set of service plans becomes available in June 2011. Exchange Online has been available stand-alone and as part of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) since 2008, but the Office 365 release upgrades the service with Exchange 2010 support and adds new features and subscription plans. Moving from an on-premises Exchange deployment to Exchange Online could help organizations reduce staffing and hardware costs, although not all Exchange features are available on the hosted service, and migration can be time-consuming.

Service Strong on Client, Management Features

Exchange Online offers Exchange Server’s core e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendaring features; virus and spam filtering (using Forefront Online Protection for Exchange); and regular data backup or replication to provide data restoration/recovery in the event of failure. Exchange Online is offered in multitenant and dedicated editions. Customers of the multitenant edition are hosted on shared hardware in Microsoft data centers whereas server hardware is dedicated to a particular customer with the dedicated edition.