Can I use SharePoint online like I would SharePoint enterprise? Say I wanted to create multiple similar and related external facing sites; do I have a limitation on how many external sites? So I can take advantage of all features of SharePoint like mail, reporting and storage without deploying SharePoint on premise or creating s custom portal site. My plan is to run everything on the cloud. What would be the best approach?
That is a bit of a loaded question.
First, external facing sites:
You will for sure run into issues with your requirements for “multiple external facing sites.” I believe you only get 1 public facing Site Collection (which is created for you by default in SharePoint Online 2013). However, as I understand, you can not create sub-sites within that Site Collection. If you are looking for extranets, the story is getting better with “external users” and even using guest links within SkyDrive or other document libraries. By this I mean, you can create more than 1 extranet-like sites within SharePoint Online.
Second, “Other features: mail”
I assume that you mean Outlook? Outlook is a component of Office 365, so yes, you can run email in the cloud.
Third, “The rest of the features”
On-prem & Office365 are still different products. The cloud is getting closer and closer to it’s on-prem counterpart (most recently with the search web part and cross site-collection publishing), but there is a difference in their features. If your current usage of SharePoint is simplistic, you will likely not see any critical differences. If your current SharePoint environment is complex and/or custom, you will have to do some work moving to the cloud.
Some other notes:
One thing to consider is a hybrid approach in which some of your applications (perhaps any applications that were customized) live on your on-prem environment and you begin moving everything else to the cloud.Â
That was a bit of a mouthful – let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
Cheers
