The questions you should ask yourself when adopting Office 365. Part 1

adopting-Office-365

Adoption of cloud technologies like Office 365 will continue, there’s no doubt. As the amount of cloud data grows the companies that use Microsoft Office online also need some additional tools to archive and backup their cloud data.

See the checklist of the issues you may come across if you do not use any third-party applications to backup and archive your Office 365 emails.

Does your company use any other email systems besides Exchange?

Office 365 native archiving tools can only work with Exchange email content. So if you use some other corporate email systems like Gmail you need to find a way to back them up too,

Has your company ever been involved in eDiscovery?

Even though Microsoft has added basic eDiscovery functions to Exchange Online and Office 365, it still  lacks some functions for those companies that have moved some of their eDiscovery processes in-house to save money. Lots of third-party email backup solutions offer advanced eDiscovery features that help you to cover these issues.

Has your company ever been involved in litigation with emails as important evidence?

The mailbox is the most targeted data storage in eDiscovery. The ability to search across both the mailbox and backed up emails with advanced search capabilities and without limits can significantly help you to win the process.

Does your company need an exact copy of record for all archived content?

A copy of record can exist only in an unchangeable storage. The Office 365 email archive is not that kind of storage in its default state.

As a part of trial preparedness, does your company archive a leaving employees’ mailbox content?

The best practice for any company is to capture and archive a leaving employee’s mailbox and other information. Office 365 provides you with a special tool called Inactive Mailboxes. The inactive mailbox can stay on Office 365 for as long as you would need it without any cost to your company. However this feature is available only to Office 365 Enterprise users.

Does your company use any non-Microsoft instant messaging platforms?

Office 365 archives only its own collaboration/instant messaging platform, Lync. For organizations that use one of the other popular instant messaging like Hangouts, a different third-party archiving solution will still be needed.

Office 365 email archive tools

If you have answered positively at least to one of these questions then you should implement additional Office 365 email archive tool like Upsafe to be always able to get access to your emails. Just sign up using your Office 365 account and enjoy the free 30-days trial.