Migration Processes and Pricing for Online Services

While online services have a reputation for being lightweight offerings, the migration from on-premises systems to Microsoft’s business online services can be complex, costly, and time-consuming, with large migrations taking many months to complete. The company has now documented many of the steps needed for a successful migration and promises partners that it will help them with large migrations. However, the company offers some migration services itself at prices that some partners say they will have difficulty matching.

What Makes Migration Difficult

Microsoft Online Services includes Microsoft-hosted instances of Microsoft’s Communications (soon to be renamed Lync), Exchange, and SharePoint Servers, as well as Live Meeting, a Web conferencing service that has always been hosted. Together, these services are sometimes called the Business Productivity Suite (BPOS).

Microsoft Online Services are conceptually simple: on-premises client software communicates with Microsoft-hosted servers, rather than servers on an internal corporate network, to retrieve and store e-mail, collaborate and manage documents and other files, hold online meetings, and perform other tasks.