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

[Maruthi Gadde]

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.

[#2]

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

[#3]

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... 

[#4]

Hi! Afaik there no official doc about what will work and not except this:

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/international-availability?SilentAuth=1&wa=wsignin1.0

I believe most services will work (could be latency) but if some don't you need to look at some VPN solution!

[#5]

hmm, seems having a vpn set up without approval is illegal also :\

[#6]

@Juan Carlos González MartínNo 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.

[#7]

@Andreas Rohr

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Some Slides ...

[#8]

@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