Improvements Suggestions

[thead@rwb.net]

I have been running this as a test in my environment now for a few weeks and have seen several areas where it could be significantly improved.
1. It is not at all intuitive when setting it up the first time, how to avoid having it attempt to backup SharePoint sites (which we don't have or use in our Office365 environment), and subsequently erroring out on every backup attempt because it couldn't find any SharePoint data. We only have Office365 email mailboxes to back up. It took me a great deal of experimentation to figure out how to get to the settings to turn off it's attempts to backup SharePoint data. You need to completely revamp the organization and Backup creating steps so that companies can easily choose which 365 services they have and what they need backed up and what they don't.
2. This needs to be more heavily integrated with your VBR product, which we use extensively, so I can set up a backup repository in my VBR environment and direct VBO to use that repository. It would be even better if the management of VBO could also be done from the VBR server console.
3. It proved very difficult for me to get this working properly in my environment. Because I could not link it into my VBR setup, I decided to simply install it on my computer and backup my Office365 mailboxes to a local SATA III internal hard drive. Unfortunately, the instructions really did not let me know that it really doesn't work very well unless the aserver portion is on one machine and the proxy and the backup target are on a completely different machine. Again the setup instructions really need serious revamping.

[Polina]

Hi Travis,

First, thank you for the feedback. It's always great to hear from users and see the ways for further improvement.

1. Flexibility in configuration options is on the table now. No specific promises yet, but some changes are likely to be implemented.
2. VBR and VBO store data differently, so such sort of integration is still an open question.
3. The way you install VBO components - on a single machine or in a distributed way - depends on your infrastructure and needs. Can you specify what issues you experienced when running all the VBO components on the same machine?