Feature Request - Backup of Office 365 Sharepoint

[Gostev]

I am afraid something like this would require us to rethink and change the product licensing completely. Otherwise, this just wouldn't work for us financially with the current licensing approach, where we're charging a mere $1 per user per month. I'm thinking even our support costs alone.

[-pekr-]

The requirement to license all organization's users was a mistake due to some miscommunication, this was never an intention. Licensing FAQ is being updated to reflect that you only need to license users who actually have access to SharePoint sites you're protecting.

Thanks Gostev, now it makes more sense. We will have 2 typical scenarios - sites, which serve as a storage to some IS.The protected storage capacity migh be 2-3 TB. Here, the number of users is going to be limited - this scenario works for us perfectly. Second scenario, is the intranet site, or a newsletter site, etc., where all users will have access. It will require very limited storage, but unfortunately, all users are going to have access there - here, the scenario does not work for us. I still think, that in regards to SP, the correct metrics is either the per site or per storage one. Will have to think about it more ...

[Gostev]

@David in discussing this more internally, I think we just need to introduce some dedicated offering for the educational sector - the one that will consider your realities and still be profitable for Veeam. I asked the cross-functional VBO team to start these discussions. In the meantime, I think using the Community Edition is the best bet for you.

@Petr sound good, please do keep your thoughts coming! We prefer to keep the licensing simple (per-user), but are still open to suggestions how to make SharePoint licensing more fair in the edge cases. Most of our customers don't have this issue, because they are buying our product primarily to protect user mailboxes (and now OneDrive as well).

[-pekr-]

Well, not much to add, Gostev In my already expressed opinion, mailboxes and OneDrive, have different aspects, than SharePoint. Mailbox and OneDrive can be easily seen as a per-user (private) stuff. And even then, with something like OneDrive, I am not much worried here, as it could be considered being kind of a backup already. Now I know, that professionals don't want to hear that But typical admin situation is to tell users to back-up to some company storage - but most users ignore that. So having OneDrive already kind of works as a backup. With the trashcan, you can cover even the eventual mistake when user deletes something. So - in our case, we were thinking mostly only to back-up OneDrive accounts of a management (top + middle), not the whole company workforce.

With the Sharepoint, we can see different aspects here. We have decided to not build an on-premises farm. But that means, that you have your data in one place only - in a cloud. It's kind an opposite to user based OneDrive. That's why we have expected per 1TB pricing, or per site one. If you add few new users to your site next week, will you have to adjust your licensing? That stuff can be quite danymic, as users will be added to internal sites on a per project etc. basis, some sites are going to be scrapped / archived, once project is finished, etc.

So, that's why, in my opinion, your recent SP licence pricing does not much the nature of the Sharepoint ...

[n0creativity]

I just want to thank the Veeam team for listening and having some discussions with regard to some of the pain points. Despite my disappointment with the initial licensing choice, the willingness to have an open dialogue about these things has been a pleasant surprise. It really isn't something I see in the tech/software provider world these days and it really is appreciated.

[Mike Resseler]

David,

Thanks! Yes we do this as we believe this is the way to design our solutions. Not only on the licensing but also on the technical side. As of last week, we started up the discussions with several teams, and while there won't be a solution quickly (I hope you understand we need to investigate this with several parties now, to make sure we don't need to change again afterwards ). But all teams agreed a solution must be found

Cheers
Mike

[Daniel N.]

@David in discussing this more internally, I think we just need to introduce some dedicated offering for the educational sector - the one that will consider your realities and still be profitable for Veeam. I asked the cross-functional VBO team to start these discussions. In the meantime, I think using the Community Edition is the best bet for you.

@Petr sound good, please do keep your thoughts coming! We prefer to keep the licensing simple (per-user), but are still open to suggestions how to make SharePoint licensing more fair in the edge cases. Most of our customers don't have this issue, because they are buying our product primarily to protect user mailboxes (and now OneDrive as well).

Hi Gostev,

I have a customer who is not eligible for any discounts (neither education nor non-profit). He has 10 main employees, 4 shared mailboxes and a sharepoint site with under 1TB of data. But also about 30 front like workers with a mailbox and access to the sharepoint site.

The issue my customer has is that the frontline workers mainly work with email. But he does not need to backups their mailboxes as their email correspondence with the is backed up with the main employee mailboxes. The frontline workers also only occasionally access the sharepoint site. Because of the current licensing, he would be forced to fully license them, even though the frontline worker data is not important at all. Before he went to the cloud, he could just protect as many VMs as he'd like, regardless of user count. There is a perceived disadvantage because before, he bought a license and fully utilized it and now he has to buy 30 licenses where he doesn't understand why he needs them. You may say 1.10 € per user (or whatever is costs) is cheap, but small companies perceive it as expensive because they have to pay for more licenses than they actually want to backup. Maybe there is a model where the customer has the better feeling of buying exactly as many licenses as he needs, even if they are a little more expensive?

Another drawback is that in SP anyone can basically invite anyone to sites they have access to. So with the current licensing model, if licensed employee X invites unlicensed employee Y to a SP site that could mean that now the SP site isn't fully licensed and not backed up. The problem is that in SP you cannot prevent users from inviting other users. Once again, this makes backups and licensing unmanageable, if you can't afford user licenses for the entire organization.

By the way, I'm a big fan of your weekly newsletter. That's the first thing I read every monday morning after waking up.

[Gostev]

Thank you for your kind words, Daniel.

You're making all valid points from the user perspective. However, there's one other critical aspect to this issue that you are missing: if we sell the solution cheaper than certain threshold, we'll loose money as a business (mostly on support costs, but also the costs of actually making the sale).

Accordingly, it was not our focus to design our licensing to provide a-la-carte flexibility for customers to tailor every bit of their needs to their liking, spending the least amount of money possible. Even if we did go this route, I assure you the pricing would be totally different than it is today to ensure profitability in the realities of such a licensing. However, it would also make licensing extremely complex, significantly complicating the sale process and again increasing our costs of doing business. So instead, we went with absolute simplest model possible - which does lack flexibility, but is very simple and predictable for customers - and, importantly, matches the way they license Microsoft Office 365 itself. And I can tell you that aside of corner cases such as ones discussed here, most customers actually love it.

Of course, every licensing model has its pros and cons. But as long as cons are mostly limited to corner cases and can be handled, it's not a problem. When a large customer has such a corner case, the issue is easy to fix there with discounts/ELA to get the price inline with their specific needs. So it's only small customers where there's no good mutually beneficial solution, specifically due to the negative profitability of such a sale. And there's only one way to solve this issue to "mutual satisfaction", where a customer gets the product and Veeam does not lose money over this transaction: by simply giving away the product for free with no support for a limited amount of users. And this is exactly what we did with our Community Edition.

Hopefully this clarifies our position a little bit - and that what I am writing makes sense, considering it's half past 2am my time

[Daniel N.]

Thanks for your reply. There is just one thing I want to make clear, because your assumption makes me look naive.

> However, there's one other critical aspect to this issue that you are missing: if we sell the solution cheaper than certain threshold, we'll loose money as a business

No. I was not missing this and did not ask for cheaper prices.

[Gostev]

Ah, sorry - did not mean to imply that of course. This was in response to the following statement:

You may say 1.10 € per user (or whatever is costs) is cheap, but small companies perceive it as expensive

[jandrewartha]

So we're a K12 school with staff and students in a single tenant, and I bought VBO to back up staff email and OneDrive, which it does fine. Currently I have a job with each staff member who's been migrated to Exchange Online manually added to it.

It would be nice to back up the staff Teams and Sites as well, but short of manually managing them (and our O365 Groups are very adhoc still) it doesn't seem easy. Even just being able to exclude Personal Sites from an Organization Site backup would be a good start, since I don't care about backup up students' personal sites, and staff personal sites are already backed up via the other job. Or if exclusion could be based on membership in a group (ie Students). Happy to pay to back up staff data, but not to back up student data (unless you have a separate cheaper student SKU, one of my general bug bears about cloud service pricing is they count students as full-priced users).

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Jandrewartha,

What you ask is actually possible. You can add an entire organization, go to the next page and exclude the same organization but then edit the processing options to exclude specific personal sites and organization site.
You can also exclude based on a group.

And since you are a K12, you should be able to talk to your representative for pricing

[jandrewartha]

No, you can't, since you either a) can't add a whole organization to the exclude page or b) if you try and add sites on the exclude page, the Personal Sites section is only an expander, not a checkbox. Excluding a group is an O365 group, not excluding all groups (or users) that have a member in common with that group.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo36 ... tml?ver=20

To exclude certain objects from processing, click Add and choose what Users, Groups and/or Sites objects you want to exclude.

Note the lack of Organization as an object you can exclude.

[Polina]

Jandrewartha,

I might be missing something here, but Mike is correct - such functionality is already available (while it, indeed, may require some manual work to configure the job).
When you expand the Personal Sites node on the exclusions screen, the checkboxes for each personal site will be available. You can check mark all the personal sites, which you would like to exclude from processing.
Another way to add team/group sites only to a backup job is to select them on the Select items to backup screen: Backup the following items -> Add -> Sites -> select the required sites from the list.

[Daniel N.]

Ah, sorry - did not mean to imply that of course. This was in response to the following statement:

Gostev, if you quote me, than quote the whole sentence and don't take out the context

You may say 1.10 € per user (or whatever is costs) is cheap,
but small companies perceive it as expensive because they have to pay for more licenses than they actually want to backup. Maybe there is a model where the customer has the better feeling of buying exactly as many licenses as he needs, even if they are a little more expensive?

[jandrewartha]

I might be missing something here, but Mike is correct - such functionality is already available (while it, indeed, may require some manual work to configure the job).
When you expand the Personal Sites node on the exclusions screen, the checkboxes for each personal site will be available. You can check mark all the personal sites, which you would like to exclude from processing.
Another way to add team/group sites only to a backup job is to select them on the Select items to backup screen: Backup the following items -> Add -> Sites -> select the required sites from the list.

I have 1650 students, I'm not ticking that many boxes one by one.

[Mike Resseler]

@jandre, you don't need to. There is a hierarchy (I don't have a screenshot available at this moment) that allows you to exclude the "personal sites" at a root level.

[jandrewartha]

Here's my screenshot *waits 10 minutes for all the sites to load*:

Notice the lack of tickbox next to Personal Sites. This is 2.0.0.954.

[Polina]

Jandrewartha,

It does take some time to resolve sites due to the under the hood processes, and this is something which cannot be speeded up at the moment.

I'm also adding sites multi-select option and [possibly] root-level select as enhancements to add in future releases. Thank you for pointing us to this!

[Crandall]

My work around for the lack of tick box at the root level was to do a search for "(tenant name here)-my". This will bring up all of personal sites, and then there's a check box in the top left corner in the Title column you can check to select everything. The downside to this method is any new users you create with OneDrive for Business accounts will have to be checked manually.

It's not pretty, but for the short term it works.

[Mike Resseler]

Simple but smart workaround. Thanks for the tip Crandall!

[archickm]

Not knowing all the O365 options and capabilities.

I too have a customer that utilized OneNote via O365. Does OneNote only store data in the user's OneDrive service, or does the OneNote data get stored elsewhere?

If OneNote data is stored in OneDrive, then I can relay that OneNote is covered, else do we have a timeline for when OneNote will be able to be protected as well?

[Mike Resseler]

Michael,
OneNote data is stored on the OneDrive service and yes, we are backing that up

[-pekr-]

Just wanted to chek in after some time. So still the same situation = no ability to licence / back-up just selected users (Exchange, OneDrive) and Sharepoint sites? Do we still need to license all our tenant users?

[Polina]

Hi Petr,

Licensing has not changed. It's a per-user licensing to protect personal data (mailbox/archive and OneDrive) and licensing each user that has been granted access to SharePoint sites to protect those sites. You may want to check the updated documentation for more information.

Thanks!

[-pekr-]

What does it mean that "Each SharePoint user in your Office 365 subscription (or On-Premises deployment) that has been granted access to the SharePoint sites needs to be licensed to back up and protect your SharePoint environment."?

Does it mean, that if I have E1 and E3 users and I assign them E1 or E3 licence, has effectively gained access to Sharepoint, and hence you simply license per the number of licensed users in a tenant? Or does it mean, that you search thru sites, check the access rights / groups, count the users there?

[Mike Resseler]

Petr,

It means this: If you want to protect a certain sharepoint site, then indeed you need to know how many users have access to that. I do know that this isn't that easy and we are thinking about better ways but no resolution at this moment

[wileywimberly]

In the license sections of the docs it states:

Microsoft SharePoint Online or On-Premises SharePoint
Each SharePoint user in your Office 365 subscription (or On-Premises deployment) that has been granted access to the SharePoint sites needs to be licensed to back up and protect your SharePoint environment. If you have a hybrid SharePoint deployment (On-Premises SharePoint and SharePoint Online), and the same user has access to both, only one Veeam license is required for such a user.

It then states:

A license is not required for:
Group SharePoint sites.

What is the difference between a group sharepoint site and a site that grants access to multiple users where each user must be licensed?

This doesn't seem very clear to me.

Thanks!

[Mike Resseler]

Willey,

A regular site is one which is in the hierarchy of SharePoint. A group site is an automatic site that is being created whenever you create the group. It allows you to store documents specific for that group and is always attached to an office 365 group.

Cheers
Mike

[wileywimberly]

Makes sense, thanks.