To the cloud

For something like 15 years I have been hosting my personal email on a server in my house.  It is a full Windows server complete with business class Microsoft Exchange.  It currently is a Windows 2008 R2 server running Exchange 2010.  There have been a handful of incidents over the years where I had an outage or some data loss but for the most part my in home set up has been solid.  However the technology is getting long in the tooth so I have been considering what I wanted to do next, get better server hardware at home so I could update to the most recent versions of Windows server and Exchange or do what many businesses are doing nowadays, move my email to the cloud. Maintaining my own home email server at one point seemed like a cool/fun idea. Nowadays it just seems like more of a pain in the ass.

There are two dominant players in the cloud email business, Google Apps and Office 365.  Since I get a deal on Office 365 through my Microsoft affiliations/certifications it was a pretty easy choice for me as to which I would use.   Getting email for my duf.net domain flowing to the Office 365 server was pretty simple and easy.  What is not so easy is doing stuff like migrating email from my old server into the account.  I was surprised how much trouble I have had thus far making that part of the migration happen.  Hopefully by the end of the day the move will be 100% complete.