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Maruthi Gadde's avatar
Maruthi Gadde
Iron Contributor
Mar 05, 2019

Using Office 365 while Travelling to China or having a Regional office in China

I am looking for Guidance for Multinational companies having Regional offices in China.

I am aware that the Office 365 in China is managed by 21Vianet.

If a multinational organization (assume base tenant in US) wants to rollout office 365 for its China employees; - What are the Drawback.

Similarly, if an employee from the US office travels to china what will be the impact on office 365 services for that employee.

Reading through so post, I understand that OneDrive for Business is blocked via the Browser. The Sync Client Works - Not sure how.

Some mention that we must use VPN.

Is only OneDrive impacted. Any other office 365 services are impacted. Any details would be appreciated.

exchange
office 365
onedrive
sharepoint
Skype for Business
  • A--Miller's avatar
    A--Miller
    Copper Contributor
    Dec 16, 2019

    Maruthi Gadde  adding to the thread based on the experience of a multinational company with several offices in China, and a tenant outside of China:

     

    In the typical case our China users can access all O365 services from our offices.  Performance varies greatly based on time of day, political climate and which ISP is used.  As an example, sending an email with an attachment may work as expected one day, but be extremely slow (or fail completely) the next.

     

    The same is true for our visitors to China.  When accessing from a hotel instead of the office performance is typically worse.  In this case we can VPN to an office within China to improve the situation.  

     

    If you want a 90% solution get higher quality Internet connections for your offices.  If you need to do better than that you have to work with a carrier to implement some from of Private Network solution.

     

    -AM

  • jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
    jcgonzalezmartin
    MVP
    Mar 06, 2019
    My understanding is that if your Office 365 tenant is not in China, access to all the services will be affected and you will need a way (the VPN can be an option) to be able to bypass connection restrictions and access to Office 365 services
    • Andreas Rohr's avatar
      Andreas Rohr
      Copper Contributor
      Jul 12, 2019

      jcgonzalezmartinNo this is not correct. You can access Azure/Office365 in China, BUT there are some Laws, that you have to store local Data in mainland China.

    • Maruthi Gadde's avatar
      Maruthi Gadde
      Iron Contributor
      Mar 06, 2019

      Thank you for your response, is there a public article from Microsoft with details on what will work vs not work..  What is the work around for this... 

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