Office 365 – Quick Overview of Exchange Online

Microsoft Office 365 which is currently in private beta phase is a next version of Microsoft BPOS offering containing SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Lync Online and all of them in the in the cloud available as a service. Also Office Professional Plus is available which provides enhanced productivity while working with various online offerings. Following is a brief overview of Exchange Online with focus on mailbox capacity, audit logging, ability to perform legal hold on mails and new and improved administration console in Exchange Online. Please note that the details are subject to change as Office 365 become generally available.

In today’s world emailing is one of the most essential features for any organization and to keep it secure, highly available and easy to use is considered as one of the most essential requirement. Exchange Online offers various mail box sizes which are mainly dependent on subscription type. At the time of writing in Office 365 beta, following plans are available.

With Exchange Online you can also put a cap on a maximum size of a mail box that comes with the plan and hence reducing the mailbox storage for users. It’s common for organizations to request this reduction in mailbox sizes as quantity and size of mails become overwhelming. In order to achieve this you have to configure what is known as “Capacity Alerts” for user mail boxes, essentially these are notifications send to users as their mailboxes reaches the maximum sizes. There are three levels of notifications as shown below and each putting higher constrain on mail usage and penalizing user by limiting certain mail functionality until they decrease their mail box sizes to desired size.

Exchange Online uses the following default values for sending notifications and it is based on mail box type which is essentially tied to subscription plan. So depend on your requirements you can simply use Remote Power Shell which is available for Exchange Online to decrease these values to an amount that suites you. Read full article here

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Originally published on WordPress on 2011-04-08.