Considersation of Exchange Online services

Question

We are considering using Exchange Online Service for replacing our legacy pop/smtp email hosting service from our ISP. For that we want to review the performance of the service and issues we need consider.
1) our users are using outlook 2007/2010 for email. After change to Exchange Online service, can we still use outlook for email? How we should connect to the new Exchange Online Service?
2) Bandwidth required for the exchange online service for 30 users?
3) Some of our colleagues need travel to ASEAN Countries, Middle East, Greater China, Korean, Japan,etc. Do that need access thru servers in Hong Kong (where our office locates)? Can the Online Web service be used in those countres?
4) Now user are archiving their emails into Outlook Data file (.PST), how should we do the archiving with Exchange Online service? some of the users receiving 10GB email per year and we possible need keep them for 7 years. Any suggestion?
Any other consideration?

Answer 1

1) You can, but you need to update them and run the Desktop setup from the Office 365 portal. Configuring the account is usually done by Autodiscover, so all you need to do is enter username and password. Here's an example article:
https://support.office.com/en-ie/article/set-up-email-in-Outlook-2013-6e27792a-9267-4aa4-8bb6-c84ef146101b
2) Well it depends on the usage of course, but overall it will not be that different from your current setup. Higher latency yes, but that will be compensated by using Cached mode. Here's a general article with information and troubleshooting tips for network
performance and Office 365:
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/f97c2f06-0426-443d-8a16-d98abb0da252#EstimateBandwidthRequirements
3) It can be accessed from anywhere, unless specifically blocked by ISP/government.
4) You get 50GB by default, if you need more storage you can get the Exchange Online plan 2 license, that comes with unlimited archiving. There are advanced legal and compliance features that can meet most of the requirements for large enterprises as well,
so you should be OK. And if you need to keep mail for people that have left the company, you can just use Inactive mailboxes for free:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn144876(v=exchg.150).aspx
The biggest 'gotcha' is the fact that there is no point-in-time backup in O365. You as the administrator will be responsible for making sure an item is preserved when needed, or recovering items that the user removed by mistake. As mentioned above, there
are a lot of features that can help you with that, so you should have no problems if you are prepared. But it's worth explaining to the users that you might not be able to recover "that message I deleted 6 months ago".