Microsoft assembled some numbers to show that Office 365 has had almost no downtime for the last year. For four quarters in a row, the Office 365 services (hosted Exchange email, Sharepoint, Lync, and Office Web Apps) were up and running more than 99.9% of the time – between 99.94% and 99.98%, to be exact.
The uptime numbers measure all customers – business, government, and educational institutions – and cover services worldwide, with no breakdown by country or region. There may be specific individuals or businesses that fell below those marks.
It’s pretty impressive. It’s hard to keep perspective when you experience a frustrating Outlook disconnect, but on the whole Office 365 has been rock solid for the last year or more.
The blog post about the high availability talks reassuringly about the redundancy in the services:
“We build physical redundancy at the disk/card level within servers, the server level within a datacenter and the service level across geographically separate data centers to protect against failures. Each data center has facilities and power redundancy. We have multiple datacenters serving every region.
“To build redundancy at the data level, we constantly replicate data across geographically separate datacenters. Our design goal is to maintain multiple copies of data whether in transit or at rest and failover capabilities to enable rapid recovery.”
One interesting way to think about the high availability: if you’re a small business with an onsite mail server, the chances are that its availability has been less than 99.9% because of the time spent installing patches and restarting.
In 2013 Microsoft has been upgrading the Office 365 servers to new versions of Exchange, Sharepoint, etc., that are better designed for cloud access and high availability. I’d expect the uptime numbers to improve as the service continues to mature.
I’m still confused about how to set up an Office 365 PERSONAL outlook.com address. Let me make sure I understand correctly, an outlook.com address using Office 365 Personal is not the same as an outlook.com web based email address, as it was not formerly hotmail.com, or live.com. While it is NOT and Enterprise address, it is still on a different server as the plain outlook.com address. Correct? I cannot find anything that tells me how to set up and Office 365 Personal outllook.com address. I did see something somewhere in the past several hours that read WHATEVER@outlook.outlook365.com, so I was wondering if THAT would be the domain to use, or if maybe it’s just WHATEVER@outllok365.com? This is driving me nutz. I’ll keep checking back to see if there is an answer. I didn’t get up really early this morning, I just haven’t gone to bed yet. I’m like a maniac who just can’t stop when I can’t figure something out. It’s worse than gambling at the casino.
You’re on the right track, and it’s simpler than you might think.
Microsoft’s free personal email system uses @outlook.com email addresses – just like Google’s free mail uses @gmail.com addresses.
Outlook.com is the successor to @hotmail.com and @live.com. They’re all part of the same system.
Office 365 is a marketing term. For individuals, it is used ONLY for licenses to use the Office programs – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook. It is NOT directly connected to the Outlook.com email service.
Buying an Office 365 personal license requires logging into that license system to identify yourself. The login name is your personal Microsoft account. It is frequently (but not always) an @outlook.com email address. But think of that as a coincidence – it’s just a login name, not anything that formally ties “Office 365” to “Outlook.com”.
Oh, and one more thing. Microsoft uses “Outlook” for too many things. The Outlook desktop program is an email program that can connect to many different types of email accounts. The Outlook desktop program can connect to an Outlook.com email address – but it can also connect to a business address or a Comcast address or a lot of others.
It’s different on the business side, but that’s the gist of the personal side. Good luck!
OK, I’m still confused about Office 365 Personal, and setting up an outlook.com email account. As simply as you have tried to explain it, I get it a little better, but I am still unsure, and haven’t found anyway to set up a PERSONAL Office 365 Outlook email account. I see Office 365 Personal as a SUITE of applications that I can use, one of which is outlook.com (not formerly hotmail.com or live.com). This particular outlook.com is not a web based email client, but is actually on an outlook server, correct? I had MS Professional 2010 installed on my PC for years after I retired, which I was able to purchase through work because if you did work on your PC at home, they had a volume license for employees. When I had to uninstall it because of some pop up that I kept getting from Microsoft, I couldn’t reinstall it because it asks for your outlook email address, which was of course my old work email address, which was an Enterprise address, using my work’s domain after @. I have seen some information in all of the sites I have looked that showed the address would be WHATEVER@outlook.office365.com. I have looked at so much stuff, my eyeballs are rolling around in my head. It’s 5:12 a.m., and no I didn’t get up early, I just haven’t gone to bed yet. Is there a place that very simply tells me how to create an office 365 personal outlook.com address? I am using a web based outlook.com address for my Microsoft address, which I’m sure is going to be a problem. I too have too many damn email addresses because of Microsoft forcing us to create a Microsoft address….and then a LOCAL WINDOWS address…I’m so confused, I don’t know which is which, I am now getting “Display” names that are variables of my name, one, the gmail address that was changed because I added it to my outlook.com email. If you could please explain that to my thick head, or maybe I’m just sleep deprived, I would appreciate it. Or maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way, and it is nothing like the outlook address I had that was an Enterprise address. BTW, when I used that outllook.com email address, it too had some weird Display name attached to it, and I couldn’t go in the coding to change it. I could SEE IT, but I wouldn’t change it. So this is something I don’t think I’ve understood from the beginning. But for now, good night. I love your website, found it accidentally and have saved quite a few items in my favorites to look at later. I’ll check back tomorrow to see if there is anything my blonde head isn’t getting. Thanks, Cat