Our customer had an existing Exchange 2010 environment hosted on premises and wanted to pilot Office 365. To facilitate a pilot in which most users remained on-premises while pilot users were moved to Office 365, a hybrid approach that allowed for the coexistence of on-premises and cloud services was recommended.
Gotham performed an assessment of the existing environment, developed a pilot plan, configured the hybrid deployment of Office 365, tested the solution, and then migrated the users.
Benefits of the hybrid approach included:
- Unified Global Address List (GAL)
- Free/busy and calendar sharing between on-premises and Office 365
- Centralized mail flow through on-premises filtering and policies
- Centralized mailbox management
- Message tracking, MailTips, and multi-mailbox search between the on-premises Exchange and Office 365
- Single Outlook Web App URL and single sign-on for on-premises and Office 365 mailboxes
Office 365 provides our customer with a secure, cloud-based platform to host collaboration services for the organization. The hybrid deployment allowed them to migrate to Office 365 in a controlled manner with proper testing.