Will Office 365 get you fired?

What’s on the mind of the IT admin these days? If the talk around me at the Connections conference here in Orlando is any indication, one big topic is Microsoft Office 365, mingled with the fear of being out of work — especially if you’re an Exchange admin.

The next generation of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard) hosted application services, Office 365 is a combination of Office Professional Plus, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online. Notice, if you visit the Office 365 website, that there are no version numbers attached. This is because Microsoft wants you to think of released features, not versions. However, for those of us in the know, you’re looking at the 2010 flavors of each solution. Further, Microsoft backs these services with a 99.9 percent uptime SLA, geo-redundant data centers, and a variety of management tools, including Microsoft Online service, the Exchange Management Console (in hybrid environments), Exchange Management Shell, and Exchange Control Panel.

[ Also on InfoWorld.com: J. Peter Bruzzese has good news for admins: They can expect huge improvements in Office 365. | Follow the latest Windows developments in InfoWorld’s Technology: Microsoft newsletter. ]

What’s there to fear? Office 365 bundles a significant subset of the Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010 feature sets into a package that’s dramatically simpler to manage. A long-term Exchange admin recently told me that his company’s move to BPOS put him out of a job. You can see how an easy-to-use solution that removes the infrastructure concerns, the clustering worries, and all the other time-consuming aspects of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync might put some folks on edge about their role in the new environment.

In fact, Adam “Bomb” Carter presented an entire session on the subject. After hearing him go on about the many incredible features that Office 365 has to offer, all ready to be turned on at the flip of a switch, I came away feeling that his answer to the question of whether Office 365 will cost us jobs would most certainly be yes. I’ll tell you what he actually said at the end of this article.

The idea that moving your Exchange mailboxes to the cloud will lead to the removal of an on-premises Exchange admin is not without foundation. I’ve seen it firsthand — a company that had been running Exchange through SBS no longer needed to rely on its Exchange admin once it went to BPOS. Practically anybody can add new users. If Microsoft will be handling the backup, recovery, high availability, deployment, and more, is it time for Exchange admins to pack their bags and think about another career?

Well, yes and no — if you’re being paid an exorbitant amount of money to care for a small business with on-premises infrastructure, and your employer hasn’t come to the realization that you’re milking this job, yes, you should fear that upper management might read about Office 365. If all you want to do when you come into the office is check to see if the drives are green and hot-swap the red ones (if that ever happens), you might have an employment issue coming your way. Why? Have you been living under a rock? Do you not know that Office 365 (the slightly cooler named BPOS successor) is the endgame according to Microsoft?

Mr. Carter, however, was optimistic. His take was that modern admins will have plenty of work to do. If they’re willing to evolve, they’ll find that Office 365 still requires plenty of administration in many cases. But relieved of the added workload — putting out fires, fighting with clustering, or dealing with hardware issues — admins will instead have the opportunity to find ways to enhance the organization through IT. That is, these admins can make their people more productive so that ultimately it adds to the company’s bottom line. Nobody who can do that will be looking for work in the near future.

I agree with him. I see this as the end of the era of the Exchange admin/god. We’ve seen this before. When the IT admin went from being a rarity to a ubiquitous position (late ’90s/early 2000s), many upped their game by specializing in database administration or messaging. And those in the Exchange world have been pretty safe as demigods for 10 years.

But it’s time to evolve yet again. While retaining your on-premises savvy, you need to learn how to play nice with cloud-based Exchange through Office 365 as well. You should also diversify your knowledge and look into solutions such as Unified Messaging, Lync, and SharePoint. They all fall within Microsoft’s Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) focus, and your skills with these technologies will add to your value in the workplace.

In the end, if you fix your attention in the right direction, you may not lose your position, but rather, cement it firmly. The key may not be hiding Office 365 from your employer in the false hope it will save you; instead, you’ll have to become its in-house champion (if it truly benefits your company) or expert naysayer (if it truly doesn’t fit).

There are plenty of locked-in limitations to Office 365 — the lack of public folder support, the limitations on attachments over 25MB, the cost per user, and so forth — that may make it unwise for your company. But you should be the one to map out the pros and cons to upper management. If you don’t tell them, they’ll get their information somewhere else: out on the street or, more specifically, from the Internet.

This article, “Will Office 365 get you fired?,” was originally published atInfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.