office 365 - currently a mix of pop & organise+share

[Jurasik]

Hi all.

My company currently has approx 22 email accounts with BT Business. 3 of them are on organise & share. The rest are on POP3. We also have our own domain name. We have not yet had the notification that we are going to be upgraded to office 365. I have had discussions with BT support & it is the fact that we have this mix of accounts + domain name is the reason we have not yet been upgraded.

I have the following questions for BT:

1. I understand that Office 365 is a pay per user per month service. Will we still have the option of pop for the majority of our emails?

2. If we cannot have pop anymore, will we have to pay the monthly charge for each email on the office 365 platform, on top of the standard charges?

I  have found this page: http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/18773/related/1

but costs are not mentioned.

Can anybody shed some light on this?

[stinklyonion]

It should be best to contact BT about your questions so it can be answered directly. That is just a suggestion. 😄

[Jurasik]

I was hoping that someone from BT could answer this on here, but thanks for that.

[DaveA]

Hi,

POP access to email comes as standard, so no worries there. It's all the bells and whistles on top that require the subscription.

It is slightly confusing that the platform and product are both called Office 365, as it does make it sound like you have to have a sub to do anything at all.

Dave

[Jurasik]

Ok Dave.

Just so I understand the differences, this is how I see it:

POP3 email:

Current: BT business email lite (no additional sub) pull email.

After upgrade: BT Business Email Lite (powered by Microsoft Office 365) hosted service with small inbox (500mb) - no additional sub, push email. This will work exactly like the organise & share currently does.

Organise & share:

Current: Plus Organise & share (£4.50 a month) push email.

After upgrade: Microsoft Office 365 for Small Business. (£4.50 a month) 25gb storage with cloud apps.

Can you confirm that this is correct?

[DaveA]

Hi,

As far as I'm aware the Lite account doesn't have push email, so you need the full package to get Exchange ActiveSync.

http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/c/2048,2053,3793,3884/a_id/20177/kw/office%20365%2...

The main difference between the old and new Lite packages is the change from a 50 MB default size to 500 MB, but you do lose the ability to allocate spare space from unused licenses.

Dave

[Jurasik]

So we loose the ability to change the inbox size on the Pop accounts?

The page I posted orginally states this about the Pop account:

A hosted email service built on Microsoft Exchange 2010 so you'll have the latest technology behind you.

This is why I assumed that the POP account was changing to an exchange based system. As far as I know, MS Exchange (server based) is a push email system, which automatically syncs with various devices. I don't know why you would continue to use POP if you have access to Exchange.

Can you please clarify?

[DaveA]

Hi,

Yes you can't change the size, but you automatically have 10 times the basic Inbox size, and twice what you could have allocated to a single basic account, so you don't really lose.

And the Exchange option is for subscription accounts, which was the case with Organise and Share anyway.

Dave

[Jurasik]

I am still not fully clear on this.

The page I originally posted states that the POP accounts will change to a hosted service. I take this to mean that the emails will remain on the server, as per an exchange system. If this is the case, will it be push or pull email?

Please advise.

Also, 500mb hosted server space for our emails will soon fill up, as we send alot of attachments as part of our business. Some of our accounts have each been allocated 250mb for their inbox. We will have to archive often to keep the emails working.

[DaveA]

Hi,

Well the whole platform is moving to Exchange, which is probably why there is the statement about it in the blurb (even though it is a bit vague).  But, and this is key, the actual lite email account doesn't have any of the addtional features of Exchange that you would find in the subscription version.

Also bear in mind that if you do have an email account with the subscription, your total space goes to 25 GB.  And while it may be cold comfort, you would have to archive your lite accounts half as often, as the maximum per account on the old system was 250 MB.

Dave