Office 365, personal domain, free vs office 365 mailboxes.

[Jurasik]

Hi.

We have just received the `upgrade your business email' from BT. Upon Logging in & going to to upgrade page I see two options:

1. Manage your mailboxes on a personal domain, with the following text underneath: "If you've got a personal domain, you can't have a combination of free mailboxes and Office 365 mailboxes on that one domain. Make sure they're all the same type by upgrading or regrading your licences."

2. Password Security & "We take your security seriously. So we need you to update these passwords so
they're in line with our password policy."

With respect to point 1: We have our own domain name & a mix of Pop3 & organise & share accounts/licences. The text appears to state that this is now no longer possible & we have to have all our accounts either pop or full office 365.

This is not acceptable, as 3 of the licences (the organise & share ones) are so the users can access the emails on their mobile devices without getting into a mess with emails. We don't need the functionality of O&S on any of the other licences. If we have to upgrade all of our other licences to full 365, this could cost us another £1000 per year!

We do not wish to be forced into paying an additional amount for what is effectively the same service.

With respect to point 2: Can somebody point me in the direction of BT's password policy? I really don't relish having to go through all our licences to change every single password.

The email stated that our upgrade is due on 29/10/12. I take it that this is a deadline that we must upgrade by?

Can somebody from BT business email support please answer asap? I need to be recommending & implementing a course of action to our management before the deadline.

[Jurasik]

Just checked on the manage services>email page & I cannot see where to push back the date of the migration.

Also, When I click on the regrade licences box, I am told that I cannot downgrade the O&S licences, only upgrade the pop ones. It says I have to contact the support services to do this.

Can you tell me what will happen if I do nothing? If the migration cannot occur with the licence regrade being completed, can I just leave it alone for the moment?

[Stephenc]

Hi Jurasik,

Have you moved the migration date already?  This would stop you moving it again.  Is there a date with your migration already showing on the account?  If you take no action and there is, it will migrate this day anyway, if there isn't a date already there, then leaving it would probably delay the start date, but I'm not sure for how long.  If you contact the helpdesk and make sure your storage is below 250Mb on the accounts with the O & S licences, we can removed the licences and charges from the account.

Thanks,

Steve

[Jurasik]

Hi.

No I haven't moved the date yet. I have spoken to the BT support about the O&S licences. Said that once I have changed all the licences to the pop version, I can then immediately upgrade the old O&S licences to be ofice 365 premium (basically the same as the old O&S licence). This is a result as far as I am concerned. It keeps the balance of POP/365 the same as before.

I will back up the emails on the O&S licences this week & phone the number above on monday (date of migration) to get them to talk me through it, as I have 20 computers to change settings on.

Cheers for your help.

[Jurasik]

Just been on the phone to a less than helpful lady. Apparently, our date of migration has been pushed back by 2 weeks, after getting bombarded by emails saying it was to be today. She could not transfer me to somebody who could help with the migration, or give me a number to call them directly. I have been prepqaring the systems here (backing up email clients) for the last few days & now I am told they will call me back in the next 24-48 hours.

Not Happy!

[Jurasik]

Just been on chat the bt support - it seems that the earlier advice that we could have a mix of O&S & pop is wrong. It IS either/or, not both.

Will have to set up a gmil account for the 3 O&S users & have them forward email to Gmail, then access it by pop.

[Rank_Outsider]

I'm extremely disappointed to find this post now, after actually searching for something else.  From May of this year, our upgrade has been 'in the pipeline', and one of my concerns from the start was that we couldn't mix the Email Lite (or free accounts) with the Office 365 (or premium accounts).

The initial information I had from BT suggested that we couldn't do this after migration.  However I followed this up with one of the technical teams and was told that this was indeed possible, and that migration of our one Organise and Share account to an Office 365 account would happen automatically, with the other Lite accounts becoming the new Lite accounts (powered by Office 365).

However, our upgrade finally went through yesterday, and now we find that the Organise and Share account was converted to a Lite account, causing big problems for us (our CEO is livid).  I contacted the helpdesk via chat support, and while waiting for the "back office" to get back to me found this article, which contradicts the info I was explicitly told previously.

The service is supposed to be cheaper, but if all our accounts have to be Premium accounts then our costs will increase a great deal.  I could have been using the last few months to find a viable alternative provider before the upgrade occurred, but it looks like I may have to rush this decision now and suffer severely reduced email functionality in the meantime.  The final straw will be if BT insist on us paying the full 12 month minimum period after we're forced to switch due to misinformation. 

There are a few other things that have been very annoying about the whole process, but I don't want to get started on a rant just now - I just want to know definitively whether we can have Lite and Premium accounts for the same ourdomain.com domain without having to spend hours and hours more on this (I'll save the rant for another post - such as BT should stop pretending IMAP doesn't exist, a 500 MB inbox shouldn't stop you sending mail at 475 MB, etc, etc).

[Stephenc]

Hi Rank_Outsider,

It is not possible to mix lite and premium mailboxes on the same domain.  There is a work around but it would involve:

Register another domain (doesn't matter what it is, your clients won't see it anyway).

Setup the number of premium users you need on the new domain, login to each user and select connected accounts in options, you can then link each user to a light account from your original domain name (the one you want to use) and they will effectively be exchange accounts whereas all other mailboxes will be pop accounts.

Thanks,

Steve

[Rank_Outsider]

Hi Steve,

Thank you for replying so quickly.  When you say they will be effectively exchange accounts, what does this mean exactly?  Will our users still be able to set them up as exchange accounts in Outlook and synchronise their Blackberries using IMAP?

I'd like to understand the implications of setting it up this way before I commit to it.  The general approach that BT seems to be adopting so far is to change things over and then see what breaks, rather than giving users detailed information on what the changes will mean for them.

We can't be the only users with mixed Premium and Lite accounts - why is there no specific help on the web site?  Why are technicians giving conflicting advice?  Why didn't the emails sent to us every day for the past week (despite completing the actions specified) not include a warning or advice that this might be a problem?  These are more rhetorical questions - I expect a lot of BT staff are getting fed up with taking the brunt of people's frustration at this shambles of an upgrade.

One specific example of the poor communication before the event - the help article here describes what to do if you get two copies of each email (for POP users keeping a copy of emails on the server) - i.e. what to do once after you notice that things seem to be going wrong.  What would have been better is having the information before the upgrade, so users can take steps in advance of receiving duplicate emails in order to minimise the time taken to fix the issue.  Luckily I came across this article by accident a couple of hours before our upgrade, otherwise I'd still be sorting the duplicate emails out in my inbox (it's still not perfect - my choice was to lose all the folder & category settings on the 'old' versions of each email, or delete the 'new' copies of the emails - but then either lose them on the server or accept that archiving/deleting emails will no longer clear them from the server.)

There are other examples but I think the post is long enough and going to drift off topic.

[Stephenc]

Hi Rank_Outsider,

Yes, setting it up this way would be the only other option.

You would use the login details for the premium domain setting up exchange in outlook, and if you needed the lite domain to be the address mail sends from, once the account is connected and validated you can choose this to be the "from" address.

On the blackberry, the email address field would be the address you want to send from, but the username field would have to be the premium mailbox.  But it could be setup for IMAP.

Thanks,

Steve

[Jurasik]

To Rank_Outsider - After going through the upgrade, setting up the Gmail IMAP for te 3 iphones, sorting out a blackberry email issue (set outlook on the PC to delete emails after 1 day of originally accessing them) I would actually recommend buying your own server. It was not a massive headache to sort our systems out. The only real issue is that when the 3 iphones send email, they come up with the gmail address, even though they have been set up not to.

If you have your own server, with exchange on it, you have control over your own destiny. Also, your costs, although initially high, would even out over time.

Just my 2p.