Office 365 design question with multiple locations - best practices?

[Dieter Rauscher]

Hi there,

let's say there's a company called "Contoso" which has 200 employees in Germany and 200 in the U.S.. They share the same Maildomain @Contoso.com and are currently using 1 on-premises Exchange Server deployment in Germany. U.S. Site is connected via S2S-VPN and they use also just 1 AD (contoso.com) with 2 sites.

They now want to move to Office 365 E3 (or maybe even E5 due to S4B).

As there's just 1 AD I can setup just 1 O365 subscription, right?

So if I subscribe to O365 with location Europe/Germany (I am NOT talking about MS German Cloud), how can I accomodate the U.S. mailboxes with fast access? Having them to connect to Europe might have a performance impact, doesn't it? I can set "location" for the U.S. mailboxes to "United States" but as far as I know this does not have impact on the location where the mailbox ist stored, or?

Thank you!

Dieter

[#2]

Hi Dieter,

You are correct, you can only have 1 tenant. And all the mailboxes are stored on Europe.

You can see more information about your concern about performance here - https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Content-delivery-networks-0140f704-6614-49bb-aa6c-89b75dcd7...

[#3]

We've seen some indications that "multi-geo" tenants might be possible in the not-so-distant future, my guess is we might heard something about it next week on Ignite.

[#4]

Is the Geo-tenant option available for O365-d-vNext Setups? If yes what the design considerstion should be taken for that.

[#5]

Any ideas if multiple geo-locatioans of O365 mailboxes are available in Sep-17?

[#6]

Look out for announcements around Ignite and keep an eye on some of these sessions:

Exchange Online Multi-Geo Capabilities

Understanding Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365