Need advice about moving to business versions of Office365 / Skype / OneDrive
As the default IT guy for a very small business that started on the consumer offerings for Skype and Office, I’d like to get us onto the business plans, primarily for shared OneDrive space and ransomware protection. We currently use a hosted Exchange service that allows us to move to these plans.
But the transition to the business versions of all these apps and service worries me.
We are not co-located, so walking up to a colleague’s machine and fixing things is out. We do not have any “on-prem” infrastructure or AD. Pretty much all Windows machines.
Our Skype presence is through our personal accounts. (Do we need new accounts? How can we minimize the disruption in terms of contacts?)
Similarly we have dabbled in OneDrive and OneNote, but my one-month experience having my Documents folder on OneDrive a few months ago was terrible. Syncing would frequently stop for no reason, and I would have to stop and start OneDrive to re-start it. And on top of that it made my SSD feel like a HDD – plain old slow! I have about 11 GB and ~30,000 files, but I have 1Gbps up and down. (Next time I would not include any dev-related folders to reduce the OneDrive file count.)
So my questions are:
- How much un-installing + installing + configuring would be needed to move over our OneDrive, OneNote and Skype instances presences?
- Is noticeably slower SSD performance with OneDrive normal? Does my file count explain the slowness?
- Should I just push ahead and do it on faith … or is it as painful a process as it looks?
- If not, should we just use Box / Dropbox / something else ?
Thanks in advance!
