I have a client who has a lot of temps, a lot of part time employees, and a lot of turnover. Also, they have a lot of employees who take long leaves of absence, and come back.
Currently, they have on-premise Exchange 2007. They have Office XP, Windows XP, and Outlook 2003. (Weird, I know, but they had an existing license for Outlook 2003). They have more users than they have computers. The computers are shared between days/shifts. They rely on folder redirection very heavily. So... a few years ago, my game plan was to buy Office 2010, then get new computers at the XP EOL, but that didn't end up happening. Since that time Microsoft unveiled Office 365.
Fortunately for them, because they have on-premise exchange. I never have to delete mailboxes. If a new employee comes in, I create them a user account. AD/Exchange, is all done. I have a GPO that automatically configures Outlook to connect to exchange, so the user doesn't have to do anything but click Outlook to get to their email. Because it's already paid for, there are no monthly fees. If the person leaves, I just disable their account in AD. If someone needs access to their old email, I grant that user permissions to the former employees mailbox, and they connect to it through Outlook. (In OWA 2010, you can just use a little drop down menu, but they still unfortunately have Exchange 2007.) But dealing with this high turnover environment with on-premise exchange doesn't really cost them any more money. I don't need to spend a bunch of time backing up and deleting old mailboxes.
Last I checked with Office 365, the process of dealing with a terminated user was a big long multi-step process, where you needed to manually backup their mailbox before deleting it. Otherwise you need to keep paying for their mailbox subscription.
The client brought in another consultant who was pimping an Office 365 sales pitch really hard. Including things like "you won't need a server, you won't need Active Directory", "Replace the server with a Drobo", and even had the pricing of Office 365 wrong.
What is appealing about Office 365:
No huge upfront cost.
OWA 2007 sucks. (But if they had OWA 2010, or OWA 2013 nobody would be complaining.)
Includes Lync. (IMHO, the only selling point because Lync Server is so expensive and difficult to deploy)
Whats not appealing about Office 365:
Much more expensive in the long run.
(They are not bleeding edge, if they had Office 2007, this upgrade would likely not even be discussed.)
More expensive.
Billed per user. (not billed per computer, and they have more users than computers. )
My understanding is you need to delete the mailboxes if you don't want to pay for a user.
But my big question is: Did Microsoft recently change Office 365 so you can have a "disabled" mailbox and not pay for it, or do you still need to delete the mailbox to stop paying for it?
IMO, Either way, because they have more users than computers, it's going to be more expensive. Add in the juggling of user accounts, the monthly fee attached to each part time user. Add in the fact that they forget to tell me when employees leave, etc. Office 365 doesn't seem like the most cost effective solution for this situation. (buying Office 2013 VL seems more cost effective in the long run.)
I'm not against them using Office 365, but I'm sick of everyone treating it like it's a frigging miracle cure for everything (even hardware problems), and I'm afraid of the hidden costs. (and this client squeezes every penny until zinc squirts out Lincoln's nose)
http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/148/t/19428.aspx
https://www.cogmotive.com/blog/office-365-tips/dealing-with-terminated-employees-in-office-365
The only other option I have seen is some people recommending turning the mailbox into a "shared mailbox". Anyway, this is still a lot more steps than clicking "disable", but I do this A LOT. So maybe I'll need to automate the process with powershell. But frequently a person leaves and comes back, so it's really easy to just click "enable" on their account. (Sometimes, their account wasn't even disabled in the first place.)
I don't know....
It doesn't *really* matter. But I'm trying to find the most cost effective solution for my client.