We recently had a massive screwup with our Exchange Server. Still running 2003, it crashed, and we were faced with the idea of migrating everything to Exchange 2011.
From a financial viewpoint, the cost of owning all the physical hardware was bearable, but being able to do all the setup work as well as maintenance was not. We are a small company and those of us who get involved in the IT side of things only do it part-time. Works well for the most part.
Instead of investing literally hundreds of man-hours to setting up Exchange 2011, we spent 4 hours signing up for Office 365, and migrating everything onto the Microsoft 'cloud.' Had one issue where our calender entries got deleted, and we called Microsoft Support, and they had it fixed within a day.
It has been 6 months or so, and we have literally had zero problems. It just works, and somewhere in a data centre, some guy that probably helped build Exchange is making sure we get 99.9% uptime. We can't compete with that inhouse. Simply impossible.
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