Yay Azure opening datacenter in Aussie

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coffeebaron

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#1169354 5-Nov-2014 16:07

jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Beat me to asking same question :)

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#1169587 5-Nov-2014 21:52

coffeebaron:
jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Beat me to asking same question :)

At this stage its only the Microsoft Azure datacenter that is opening in Australia - nothing to share on when, or if, Office 365 or Dynamics CRM might come down under. It is definitely something that we (AU/NZ) are all asking/pushing for.

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nathan

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#1169598 5-Nov-2014 22:16

jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Exchange should perform quite well, OWA is light and works asynchronously, Outlook has a cache mode.

Do you see problems today or is it some of the other Office 365 components like SharePoint?

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#1169600 5-Nov-2014 22:18

coffeebaron:
jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Beat me to asking same question :)

Curious to know if you'd would be prepared to pay more for it? Sydney had higher costs with lower economies of scale right now

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#1169604 5-Nov-2014 22:22

nathan: Curious to know if you'd would be prepared to pay more for it? Sydney had higher costs with lower economies of scale right now

I can't see any benefit in having Exchange closer, given the vast majority of people will be using cached mode in Outlook. Sharepoint file access from Word 2013 for example feels too slow at present for all but the most patient, so it would be interesting to do a comparison with Sydney-based files.

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coffeebaron

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#1169703 6-Nov-2014 08:10

nathan:
jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Exchange should perform quite well, OWA is light and works asynchronously, Outlook has a cache mode.

Do you see problems today or is it some of the other Office 365 components like SharePoint?

It's noticeable when you are sending / receiving large emails, or when you are doing an initial migration of email into cloud that it is not overly fast. This is on various different ISP's and was certainly noticed when moving away from an NZ base email host. Also similar for OneDrive / SharePoint, slower than having something closer - e.g. downloading / upload a file to a NAS on a UFB connection.
Obviously no issue with Outlook itself being slow, unless you forget to move the slider from 12 months to cache all mail :)
As for paying more? Probably not really, I figured when I signed up to 365 that it was a growing, expanding product and eventually they would have a host closer to NZ. Though in saying that, sure if the price went up marginally - 50c per user or something; yea I'd keep using it.

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#1169748 6-Nov-2014 09:05

nathan:
coffeebaron:
jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Beat me to asking same question :)

Curious to know if you'd would be prepared to pay more for it? Sydney had higher costs with lower economies of scale right now

Yes, would definitely pay a small premium for our Exchange to be Sydney based rather than Singapore. While I suspect a reasonable chunk of our issues with the performance are related to our current ISP, I think it unfair to put all the blame with them. With a user base of only 60-odd, we have at least a couple of users a day have issues with Outlook failing to connect to Exchange, or time out, or similar issues, usually related to larger messages or simply a large message queue waiting to sync. We're not that big, but we're seriously considering bringing Exchange back in-house because the support overhead when it was, was lower than the support overhead of helping multiple users a day with relatively basic "it's too slow/I can't send email" type issues.

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Snowflake

#1170142 6-Nov-2014 15:53

Inphinity:
nathan:
coffeebaron:
jnimmo: Do we know if this might mean NZ Office 365 customers being migrated to Sydney for Exchange? That would be awesome

Beat me to asking same question :)

Curious to know if you'd would be prepared to pay more for it? Sydney had higher costs with lower economies of scale right now

Yes, would definitely pay a small premium for our Exchange to be Sydney based rather than Singapore. While I suspect a reasonable chunk of our issues with the performance are related to our current ISP, I think it unfair to put all the blame with them. With a user base of only 60-odd, we have at least a couple of users a day have issues with Outlook failing to connect to Exchange, or time out, or similar issues, usually related to larger messages or simply a large message queue waiting to sync. We're not that big, but we're seriously considering bringing Exchange back in-house because the support overhead when it was, was lower than the support overhead of helping multiple users a day with relatively basic "it's too slow/I can't send email" type issues.

what sort of connection are you using, and which ISP? (PM if you prefer)

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lchiu7

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#1181175 22-Nov-2014 10:50

Well I encountered one small issue. Tried to do a proof of concept of Site to Azure DR and chose Australia for the Site Recovery location. But there was no choice for Australia for the Storage Account so I chose Southeast Asia thinking that might be Singapore.

Turns out you can't do that because the two sites are in different geo locations. I had to create another Site Recovery location in Southeast Asia to proceed with my pilot.

And after all the setup work, the recovery step fails consistently with this message

Protection couldn't be enabled for the virtual machine. (Error code: 70094)

Provider error

Unable to complete the request. Operation on the xxx.xxx.local server timed out.
Try the operation again. (Provider error code: 2924)

And checking the Event Viewer on the Hyper-V host indicates a network error which I presume is just Internet timeout.

Have no idea how to get around this. I thought our work Internet is okay but clearly upstream traffic to Singapore isn't fast enough.

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#1191894 9-Dec-2014 06:25

Today we are announcing that Office 365 and CRM Online services will be delivered from Australia Datacentres by the end of March 2015!

Existing Office 365 customers will be automatically moved from the APAC DCs to the new Australian DCs by Microsoft (unless they opt-out) at no fee.

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#1191936 9-Dec-2014 09:05

Awesome news, This should help our sharepoint no end. It is not too bad in Singapore, but less lag is always a good thing.

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#1191937 9-Dec-2014 09:08

Good news about auto moving existing APAC customers to AU DC's for Office 365 users. We are just piloting it with IT staff at our organization now via SEA DC.

Do whatever you want to do man.

coffeebaron

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#1191987 9-Dec-2014 10:13

YAY!

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coffeebaron

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#1237027 13-Feb-2015 09:35

nathan: Today we are announcing that Office 365 and CRM Online services will be delivered from Australia Datacentres by the end of March 2015!

Existing Office 365 customers will be automatically moved from the APAC DCs to the new Australian DCs by Microsoft (unless they opt-out) at no fee.

"By end of March" - does this mean migration will start by end of March? Or does it mean that by end of March all NZ Office 365 users will be served from AU?

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coffeebaron

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#1237135 13-Feb-2015 10:43

My answer just arrived in an email today, September onwards :(
https://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn878163.aspx

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