retiring a server

[Big Jim]

I am seeing more and more posts on here from you guys, suggesting retiring servers and moving customers to cloud based services.

I have a client with a smallish office (around 5/6 desktops) and an old server which they are really dragging their heals to replace.
I can use one drive for file sharing and email is microsoft hosted exchange.
It does obviously handle AD and DNS, but for the most part everyone has a sits at the same PC every day so multiple logins to 1 PC are redundant.
The only thing that they have on it that couldn't be easily done in another way is sage.

Every computer uses sage regularly throughout the day (3 separate instances in some cases)
I understand that Sage offer cloud based software now, but I assume there will be a performance hit by doing that ?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

You use Teams/Sharepoint to replace the "file sharing". One Drive takes over folder redirection...grabs the users Documents, Desktop, and Pictures folders...and any other folders they make under the root of it. But to replace the "shared drive" on the old on prem server, you use Sharepoint for that...Document Libraries. However, use Teams...to create and manage those. And have them use teams for much MUCH more! Teams does SO much.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the licensing to strive for for businesses, log computers/users into AzureAD (replaces the on prem AD), InTune MEM, create policies to manage OneDrive, BitLocker, teams file sync, etc etc. Bit Premium also gives the advanced threat protection (now called Defender)...for the important added anti phishing, anti impersonation, improved spam, malware protection in both attachments and web links, etc.

 

[thecomputerguy]

You use Teams/Sharepoint to replace the "file sharing". One Drive takes over folder redirection...grabs the users Documents, Desktop, and Pictures folders...and any other folders they make under the root of it. But to replace the "shared drive" on the old on prem server, you use Sharepoint for that...Document Libraries. However, use Teams...to create and manage those. And have them use teams for much MUCH more! Teams does SO much.

Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the licensing to strive for for businesses, log computers/users into AzureAD (replaces the on prem AD), InTune MEM, create policies to manage OneDrive, BitLocker, teams file sync, etc etc. Bit Premium also gives the advanced threat protection (now called Defender)...for the important added anti phishing, anti impersonation, improved spam, malware protection in both attachments and web links, etc.

Seconding this.

For the basic file server you use Teams/SP ... Folder redirection is OneDrive per user. This works AS LONG AS the data you are referencing is not database data it must be data like pdf, xls, doc, jpg etc. Also, keep track of your data limits. SP Limits your data to 1TB per tenant and then like .15 GB per licensed user, additional storage is criminally expensive through M$.

When transferring data make it simple on yourself and create a teams group which will create a SP library for you. Use the Sharepoint Migration Tool to move the data. Don't do the OneDrive dump and sync, use the tool, it's built for this and is exceptionally easy to use to dump data in to a Teams Library.

Make sure when using the Sharepoint Migration Tool that the device you are transferring the data from has PLENTY of free storage. The tool offloads data into temporary chunks that get VERY big. I've had migrations where I've had to use an external drive because the storage on the server wasn't acceptable. There is no verbiage on how much storage you need. You will just know because your migration will fail and the log will tell you. On a 500GB migration I'd probably want at least 200GB of free storage to be safe.

The big thing I have to add to this is Sage. Have it hosted. Summit will create a server for you to host the data. I have a client with hosted Sage 500CRE at Summit and it works fine, a tad slow, but my clients last tie to a physical in house server was Sage. Now they are 100% cloud. They have 2 user licenses that 3 people use. The 3rd person rarely uses Sage so it's not a problem. Summit costs something like $60 x 2 so $120 per month. Or you can go down the nightmare path of spinning up your own cloud server. The client will complain about this so be prepared to explain how $1400 a year is better than a $10,000 server right now.

AND I get a quarterly kick back from Summit.

Finally when making the big move to the cloud get yourself a partner account at Dropsuite to back it all up. I pay $2.80 per user per month with archiving to backup each users:

- Entire Mailbox (Mail, Contacts, Calendar etc.)
- Entire OneDrive
- Teams Data

and the BIG one

- The companies Sharepoint Libraries

Good Luck.

 

[Sky-Knight]

The last bit is Sage, if they keep that on premise you can beef up one of the desktops to make that the "server". Just script whatever it needs to make its backup happen such that it dumps data into a team that only that one user has access to. Then if that "server" melts, you can simply pull the data and restore. The hosted option is "better" but sometimes people get funny about putting financial data in the cloud.

 

[brandonkick]

It'll make your life so much easier, if you were the admin of that server, to get them on M365.

There's even an M365 admin cell phone app now. You can literally manage a companies tenant from an app on your phone. Not the ideal way, but if the worlds burning down somewhere and your on the road between locations / jobs.... or away from the house / office running an errand....

HEY, JOE CAN'T GET ACCESS TO THIS SHAREPOINT SITE. NEEDS IT NOW!!11!!

Welp, as long as they pay the "drop everything" fee (or however you run your business).... pull out the ole cell phone and fix it.

Need to suspend a user access for some disgruntled employee that was just let go on a dime? Pull out the phone.


Like Sage, I run into the issue with quickbooks. Quickbooks doesn't seem to play nice with M365. They claim their use of quickbooks doesn't fit within what the online version offers either. So for now, that stays on prem. But the workstation that hosts the quickbooks gets backed up daily to an onsite synology. That synology pushes data in real time to their sharepoint site. So quickbooks changes get bounced directly to the quickbooks store on synology, and directly from there to the quickbooks sharepoint site (which is private, no members other than one admin).

Keeps their local setup simple, but also keeps everything safe in the 365 cloud.

Doesn't sound like such a simple solution would work for Sage though. If having it hosted isn't that expensive, it might be worth detangling that and just letting everything else go into M365. If you get the $22 a per seat license, it even includes AzureAD. Doesn't sound like they really need it though.

 

[callthatgirl]

Today I helped a client in one hour learn how to admin Teams, copy data to Teams and desktop sync. Her computer's OneDrive was the "server". The whole time she was asking "what about SharePoint" and I said it's the back end of Teams, and she never understood that. I told her not to worry about SharePoint, it's 2018. As her computer will be the new "server" I'm having her download all the data locally and backing up on Carbonite. They didn't want 365 backup. Kind of typical of businesses under 10 people, my cup of tea type clients.

Not sure this helps you but a thought for others reading this.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Sharepoint's actually the back end of OneDrive too!

 

[callthatgirl]

I've seen that before and was like wtf. And they name the executable OneDrive for Teams sync. Another huge mess. MS names everything Outlook and people who are home users think they have email synching because they have "365". I can't complain, these messes are my bread and butter repairs lol.

 

[brandonkick]

I think the easy way to "make it stick" was I told the company I'm currently working with that OneDrive is the singular employee version of cloud storage and SharePoint can be thought of as the "department wide" version of sharepoint.

Joe works in accounting. Joe has his own personal employee storage... joes onedrive. Joe (and everyone else in the accounting department) can access the accounting departments sharepoint site (and more importantly document library).

They seem to get it fairly well. Which some of them are very resistant to any change at all, and this all being brand new to them... I figured it would be difficult to get them to grasp it. Went rather well.


The only hangup is making them become more aware of where they are saving things and working with things. Cant be creating random new folders in the root of the C: drive, plugging in a usb thumb drive or external drive and working off those either. In order for this to serve as a true cloud solution with "backup" included, they have to be saving things to synced locations. That's a little more for them to wrap their minds around, but most people get it well enough and they / we will just have to check in on folks from time to time to make sure. The apps they use, via the "recently opened files" menus make it easy enough to quickly spot "hey... this file is in a folder called c: scans... what's that about... that should be in a sharepoint / onedrive location".