Forum Discussion
Office 365 Functionality with and without Exchange Online
Depends, do you mean a single user, or the entire organization? If it's a single user, he will not be able to access the unified GAL or see free/busy (availability) information for others in the company. Some other features are only available for Exchange Online mailboxes, and as you mentioned the interoperability between the different O365 workloads will suffer. For example, with Groups he will not be able to access the conversation history directly, or work with the Group calendar directly. The list of Groups surfaced in Outlook/OWA will also not be visible. MyAnalytics or Planner will not be available. For Teams, there is detailed info posted here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/exchange-teams-interact
Even some of the admin tools might not work as expected without Exchange Online license, but those examples are mostly limited to the O365 Admin Center UI and you can work around them by using the other endpoints.
Most of the above apply for the "entire organization not using Exchange Online" as well, and there are other features such as Bookings that use Exchange as their backend. Some features can still be used if you are in Hybrid configuration, others are simply not available. TL;DR - you need Exchange Online if you want to use the service "as Microsoft intended".
Depends, do you mean a single user, or the entire organization? If it's a single user, he will not be able to access the unified GAL or see free/busy (availability) information for others in the company. Some other features are only available for Exchange Online mailboxes, and as you mentioned the interoperability between the different O365 workloads will suffer. For example, with Groups he will not be able to access the conversation history directly, or work with the Group calendar directly. The list of Groups surfaced in Outlook/OWA will also not be visible. MyAnalytics or Planner will not be available. For Teams, there is detailed info posted here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/exchange-teams-interact
Even some of the admin tools might not work as expected without Exchange Online license, but those examples are mostly limited to the O365 Admin Center UI and you can work around them by using the other endpoints.
Most of the above apply for the "entire organization not using Exchange Online" as well, and there are other features such as Bookings that use Exchange as their backend. Some features can still be used if you are in Hybrid configuration, others are simply not available. TL;DR - you need Exchange Online if you want to use the service "as Microsoft intended".
Thanks Vasil!
It just seems kind of strange there is not one big cheat sheet for with Exchange Online or Not, but your link will be my book mark now!
Thanks again and have a great week!
Well the problem with those lists is that someone needs to maintain them - things change so rapidly in O365 and services/features get added (or removed) so often, that it's hard to keep up with all of it. I'm certainly too lazy to do so, and after all I would prefer an "official" Microsoft article on the subject, but alas I haven't seen any.
