Last week I sat down (in virtual terms) with Matt Gervais, site editor of SearchExchange.com to discuss some questions arising from a recent survey that they had done of Exchange customers to determine their attitude to Office 365.  You can download the taped conversation at your leisure.

The questions I was asked were:

• At this point everyone’s heard about the recent Office 365 outages. Are these hurting/do you think these will hurt future purchasing decisions?
• In a recent site survey, several readers pointed to those outages as to their main reason for being wary of a 365 migration. What kind of assurances can you give prospective Office 365 customers who are skeptical?
• The majority of respondents to our survey said they would likely be deploying a hybrid scenario, though Microsoft mentions the hybrid wizard is primarily for companies who need to coexist during a move to Office 365. It seems a hybrid scenario is desirable for many companies. Can you elaborate on that? (What are the benefits of just hybrid?)
• What types/sizes companies do hybrid scenarios make sense for/not make sense for?
• It seems that Office 365 mostly makes sense for SMBs, is it going to make sense for large enterprises moving forward, or do you see this mostly working best for smaller companies?
• What improvements/changes would you like to see in Office 365 SP1? Also, do you have any predictions?

Again, you can download the tape of the conversation from SearchExchange.com. It sounds OK, but you’d expect me to say that!

– Tony