Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

We are using it for emails.

Feature-wise, everything is okay. We are getting the latest version of the application. You also don't need to manage anything. Everything is running at the backend. 

The best part is that even if there is a failure in the on-prem active directory, users can still access mails. You can configure MFA easily and protect the mailboxes. Integrity and confidentiality are there. In this aspect, I am very happy with Microsoft.

The security features and the engine they are using are not good enough. They are not able to protect you from phishing attacks, which is the biggest drawback of this solution. We have been getting phishing emails, and I have been chasing Microsoft every single day. In terms of configuration, all the controls that they have recommended are in place, but we are still getting a lot of phishing emails. 

I would like to see a feature that allows us to share a folder from an online archive, which is a sort of mailbox attached to the primary mailbox. Currently, you can share folders, contacts, and calendars only in the primary mailbox. You can't share any folder or other things from the online archive. The limit of the primary mailbox is 50 GB, whereas the online archive is unlimited, so it would be useful if we can share a folder from the online archive. 

I have been using this solution for more than six years.

I interact with them on a regular basis. There are certain cases that we opened two years back, and they are still pending. To enable MFA for a specific user, the admin has to be a global admin. If you want to enable or disable MFA, you have to reach out to the global admin, and we are just waiting for this feature to be enabled.

We moved to this solution because running Exchange Server on-prem is more expensive than moving to the cloud. We don't need to bother about backup, storage, or other things. In on-prem, you have limited storage, and you need to have a team of at least 15 people maintaining Exchange Server for backup, AD, and other things.

If you go with Microsoft, they will give you 80 GB in advance and all those kinds of features. They will also keep asking you to go from E1 to E2, E2 to E3, and now E5. Their prices are high, but as long as the organization is happy to pay and your emails are working seamlessly, it shouldn't be an issue.

We are now evaluating Cisco Email Security, which is better than Microsoft. Google is also there, which can save you some money, but I personally don't like Google's Gmail for business.

I would advise others to go for it undoubtedly. I have been using Microsoft products for more than 30 years, and it is my favorite email solution.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a nine out of ten.

From an Office 365 perspective, I would say that Teams and SharePoint and Planner are the most used. What Office 365 offers as a package is what is being at this moment used in the organization for us to work. At this moment, we are not so physically in the office. The majority of us are working remotely and across countries, across regions. The way for us to collaborate together and work together was by using more and more of Office 365 components.

Previously, you had the inconvenience that if you sent an Excel file to someone, you could not work together on the same file, and now you can. With the components that we have available, several people can be working on the same document, at the same time, doing the changes, doing the updates that they need to do. It makes the collaboration and the work more efficient.

We can touch base with our clients and we can touch base internally with our solutions without impacting the work or suffering from a lower speed. The performance and the efficiency of our planning and roadmap are extremely good.

The solution can scale up or down easily to meet the needs of any organization.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Technical support is quite helpful and responsive.

It would help, if, in the beginning, there was an onboarding process to show how to set it up properly or how to set up the things properly, or how to have the support they need or the guidance on how they should deploy it. In some cases, there are things that are not so crystal clear. The platform is evolving all the time. It's not that you have, let's say, a quarterly release or a yearly release. Every month there's always something new. That's the reason why it's sometimes difficult to follow up as, in different components, in different areas, the features are evolving also.

They need to give more guidance or some video training or try to understand more what the organization is trying to build or accomplish and assist them on their journey. That sometimes is difficult. The companies, for example, sometimes don't know where they want to go. Only after a few years do they have some certainty. IF a big package is being offered to a company, they should be able to sit the decision-makers down and say "Okay, this is what we have. This is what the tools can do, what the tools can offer you." It would give them really important insights. If they have those insights, then they can make a more, let's say, clear decision.

They should show more examples or POCs. They should be able to say "Okay. I can show you, for example, how this solution was beneficial for our Coca-Cola client." I know Microsoft has several clients with various solutions. It's just a question for them to show the portfolio of each solution, and how the solution was going to develop, and how the solution was deployed to those organizations. Then, potential clients can say "Oh, great. I can reuse this solution for my organization." They don't need to think about how they would use the features from scratch when they can have already something that was, let's say, POC developed.

We've been using the solution for years at least at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. Even when multiple people are working on the same document, you don't get any sow downs. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is very scalable and the company is evolving to meet the demands. Microsoft is constantly providing packages and creating packages the allow for more efficient collaboration. They have options for small, medium, and large companies. It suits businesses of all sizes and makes everyone's life much easier. 

We do plan to continue to use the solution.

We've dealt with technical support in the past, and they've always been very good. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support they provide.

It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward. It's an IT process. Since it's a cloud solution, every machine has it. You just need an organization email account which allows you to create an account. All the products are automatically assigned to you. The product is based on a subscription model which allows companies to level up or level down depending on the profile of the user. You can offer the user a certain package, or you can offer him an enterprise-level option with basically everything. That way he can have more components and more functionalities that allow him to do his work.

We had found members of the technical team that handled deployment.

Deployments depend on the company. You may need some security, some administrative individuals, or some IT or ServiceNow team members to keep up with the requests or changes or updates that are required to be done in the tool. Depending on the package that we're talking about or depending on the options that you have, not all the users have admin privileges. Random users therefore may need to make a request from an admin user, and that has to go through a ServiceNow process. Everything depends on how the organization wants to set up that structure. 

You need someone with an Office 365 background or an administration background, to be able to install what is required or to know what is required. You need someone from a security perspective to make sure that there is no breaches. You might need someone for the network also. 

You may need some SharePoint administrator if it's, let's say, topics related to SharePoint. You may need a Teams administrator if it's related to Teams. You may need someone with, let's say, Power Automate or Power Flow expertise and knowledge to also answer those inquiries. It's a deck of people that may be required. If they are going to, let's say, govern the full Office 365 package,  you may need the different people with different expertise or different knowledge across the different components and of each product. 

Our IT team handles the implementation and deployment. When they give the laptop to us to work, they already have installed all the components there. Of course, there are certain components that you can install separately. For example, Power BI. You need to install it separately. However, the Power platform, Power Flow, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams, are already incorporated into the Office 365 account. Since it's a cloud solution, it is installed by default based on the user profile that the user has.

I use this solution in a larger organization. They have an enterprise-level package.

The cost depends on the package. If you're working on an E3 license, it depends also on the contract that you have with Microsoft. There is the standard package if you don't have your own business and you are an independent user so that you pay the cost of markets. However, if you are a large enterprise, usually there's an agreement between vendor management and Microsoft to say, "Okay, we have this amount of people. We want this cost more or less to be applied." The cost usually is less than what is in the higher in the market. It differs from contract to contract.

At this moment, we have a great contract with them. The cost that we're paying for it is affordable. The only thing is, some companies may need some additional support, and for Microsoft to follow up with the evolution on the platforms that they have. Sometimes the companies lack some knowledge or some experience.

At this moment, due to the COVID situation, the majority of the things that are being used in the organization are related to Office 365 products. There was a big expansion of Microsoft Teams, for example, and it's one of the most used components inside the organization. We use it not only for meetings but for other tasks such as importing Power BI reports inside of Microsoft Teams.

We have the solution deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. Right now it's more cloud-driven. In the past, there were some things that were on-premise components. At the moment, due to COVID, almost everything is cloud-based. That allows the collaboration to be more efficient. That means you can have several people working on the same document or the same space at the same time. 

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend this solution to other companies. 

I would rate it nine out of ten.

Currently, we are using Microsoft 365 Business purely as a mailing solution and just for storing the data on OneDrive.

Microsoft 365 Business is a really good product. Microsoft provides many solutions like Microsoft Teams, which is useful for Team utilization across the globe, especially in this COVID 19 kind of scenario. 

If you enable the enhanced security in Microsoft Teams by using the given options, you can eliminate the third-party solutions like WhatsApp, Telegram. You can easily share your communication, which is much better. You can also collaborate. For example, instead of creating an Excel sheet on your local PC and sending it across to someone over email, you can just share it. SharePoint is one of the best tools to be implemented.

There are a lot of bugs, which I don't know how many people have come across. 

In Microsoft Teams, when you share any screen, I can't see much because the Microsoft Teams Window takes the majority of the space. A task section comes up and then below the screen, a list with the names of the people you are collaborating with comes up. When you have to share the screen, you get a small window, which also depends on the screen resolution of the person seeing it and sharing it. You basically need to have an extendable monitor and display unit to see the bigger screen. There should be a full functionality for changing the desktop screen to full screen. That would really be fantastic. This is surely going to be a critical area. If you see Zoom and Cisco WebEx, you get the full wider screen. 

In Microsoft Teams, voice quality can be made much better. I think the codex part can be something on which they can work further.

In Microsoft Outlook, the GUI is years old, which is boring and makes you want to switch to the postal way of sending emails. They must change the GUI.

I am a bit skeptical about the promises that are made by Microsoft. Even though Microsoft makes promises that your data will reside on the servers within your country. I don't think it is so, and the corporate data, the governmental data, and the patient data are still in Europe. In terms of the land laws, even if I have an agreement with Microsoft that my data should not be shared with any other countries, at the end of the day, the data is residing on some other land. So, the land laws of that particular country have the right to have access to the data that is residing on the server of a particular continent. So, the government can intercept the data. That's why I'm a bit skeptical. However, so far, no cases have come up related to this, but one day, it may come up. I hope Microsoft will find out a permanent solution for that. People are becoming more aware of privacy.

I've been using Microsoft 365 Business since 2009. 

In the initial stage of Microsoft Office 365, I was working with a major automobile company in India. We were given the opportunity to evaluate the solution completely in and out. It was a cloud-based solution, and our business or traveling users were eager to have this kind of solution. The expenditure as compared to the in-house solution was much lesser. There were many bugs at that time. Now, it's very good for one product.

Then I joined a multinational conglomerate, which was into a lot of businesses such as oil, shipping, large estates, and so on. Everything was there under one entity. We were successful in rolling out Microsoft 365 Business over there. 

In my current organization, I was given the opportunity to evaluate Microsoft 365 Business, and we started to use it.

I would say it is super. 

It is one of the best. Currently, we have around 8000 users. 

My team had contacted them, and they said that it's very good. From the support aspect, basically, you have to get a paid one. If you don't have any good enterprise agreement, it takes nearly eight to nine hours for them to come across a problem and solution. It lags in support. That's all. You have to pay a lot of money.

In my current organization, we were using an open-source free product Zimbra. Of course, an initial amount was paid for the licensing part. Because it was open-source, there were a lot of spams, and there was no protection for the email. Finally, a word was put across to my colleagues who were evaluating different products, and I said that Office 365 is the best one to go for. I was given the opportunity to evaluate, and it came into existence.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's a plug-and-play kind of scenario. It's very easy, but not as easy as Apple products.

The migration part from Zimbra took a long time, around three to four months. The deployment took around two to three weeks. 

Microsoft 365 Business will be good to have if you have a large organization where you have more than 3000 employees. Other cheaper solutions, like Gmail, are easily available in the market.

Microsoft Exchange is very good, and people are used to it. Gmail will be a big competitor for Microsoft later on when Gmail moves out of the comfort zone they are currently in. 

Gmail lags a lot as compared to Microsoft Office 365, which is very neat, clean, and easy to deploy. Any admin with one year or six months of experience can easily deploy Microsoft Office 365.

Even though this is the year of the cloud, I will suggest that instead of the cloud deployment, go for the in-house deployment.

Microsoft 365 Business is the best when your business is growing up and you want to collaborate using these tools. In my current organization, we don't explore Microsoft 365 Business much. If you see the Microsoft product portfolio, our utilization is just 10% as of now, which probably is applicable to most of the organizations. It is being used just for mailing and the ATP. Our administrators haven't enabled anything else and aren't interested. The joint collaboration is not there, and people are not looking into that aspect. 

We are just using a product like Microsoft Teams just to make calls so that the telephone bills don't increase. We use chat for easier corporate communication and so that we don't have to type emails. However, there are many further uses of Microsoft Teams. There may be some companies, which are utilizing it a bit more. These are many products that you can integrate and make use of the investments. The monthly payment, which you are making, to buy and maintain this product can be over-utilized.

Microsoft can also start promoting what can you do more with this product. Currently, they're only telling that this product is available, but they are not specifying how you can collaborate and integrate with other products.

The software companies are taking advantage of bringing AI, which can work. I promote AI, but it should be used for convenience, not for replacing or eliminating mankind.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten.

We are using Microsoft Office and Teams for collaboration purposes, Microsoft Teams specifically helps us during the COVID phase, increasing productivity for both remote work and onsite work.

We see a productivity increase and a better collaboration platform. Instead of booking a meeting room for discussion, we can just use Teams to meet. 

You can access Microsoft 365 Business from anywhere. You have full access to Office 365 or Outlook 365, and the support is there.

It's always updated because Microsoft does patching regularly.

It's easier to configure, and you don't have to worry about supporting the solution.

The price could be cheaper.

The technical support could be more knowledgeable.

We have been using it for two years.

We use the cloud-based solution.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have more than 1000 users.

Technical support is okay, but they could be more knowledgeable.

We were using the on-premises version before the cloud solution.

We have a yearly license, and it could be cheaper.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Microsoft 365 Business at nine.

If we have the email address and the password, we can access our documents from any system anywhere in the world.

The solution is quite friendly.

The price is the main issue. Not everyone can afford the product.

I have been using the solution since 2017. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The tool is stable.

The tool is scalable. In my organization, 10 to 15 people are using the solution. We use the solution regularly. We need the files, drives, and presentations regularly.

The product is easy to set up. The deployment was not tough. We just need to get the login credentials.

I deployed the solution myself.

We pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution. It could be more affordable.

I took feedback from others and learned about the solution’s features before using it. I would recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Microsoft 365 Business for email and desktop management. We also use Office Suite products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to manage documents. 

I don't like the tool's administration which consists of crappy operations. 

I have been using the solution for three to four years. 

Microsoft 365 Business is stable. 

The product is scalable and my company has 300 users for the tool. 

We escalated a few issues and did not get a response from Microsoft's support. The support is too complex and takes a lot of time. It is not quick. 

The product is expensive and the licensing costs are yearly. 

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten. I will recommend the tool for corporate email and document management. 

We've been using Microsoft to communicate with clients via email.

The solution has all the necessary features and automation tools required.

While using the screen sharing feature in Microsoft Teams, the screen sometimes gets stuck when we move into the remote desktop. They should work on that particular area.

We have been using the solution for nine years.

It is a stable solution. But sometimes, the solution drops for a minute. Apart from that, I have not seen any stability issues so far. I rate the solution's stability as a ten.

It is a scalable solution. More than a thousand employees in our organization use the solution. I rate its scalability as a ten.

The solution is already installed in the system. We just have to put in the credentials and log in.

You need to purchase the license.

I recommend the solution as it is the best in the market compared to other vendors like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. It is an apt solution for corporations because they get Microsoft Teams, wherein they can connect with their peers for any issues. I rate the solution as a ten.

You can use Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access, which is a database.

You can make frequent presentations to customers, and create invoices.

Excel is a very powerful tool. I can create a lot of data in Microsoft Excel and then use it and extract the data in any analytics platform.

It is a complete tool. It gives me every kind of feature that I want. It's quite good.

When you talk about ease of use, it's relative. I have been using Microsoft products for a long time. I have grown with it and the product has grown with me. I feel comfortable. But, for someone with no background in IT that doesn't have the dexterity to play with the IT tools, they may find it difficult to use.

When you get used to it, it's like picking up a paper and a pen and drafting it. You can use many more features. Paper and pen are used to exemplify simplicity.

When using PowerPoint, I want to create a very illustrative presentation. I can draw many pictures globally with several designs. It's flexible. After preparing the presentation, I can preview the form and share it with people.

It's very user-friendly.

I can use this product on five devices. I can use it on my mobile, and I have two laptops. I can access it from any one of my devices, even if I am commuting or in another country, I can access all of my documents.

Microsoft OneNote is also included. I can create my shopping list, or go on a trip, and make all of my notes accessible on all devices.

With such a complete tool, it may be difficult for a beginner to use without help.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for between four and five years.

It is a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. Most people in our organization use it.

We have approximately 50 users, maybe more.

With all Microsoft products, online help is available.

I have not had the need to contact technical support. I have not had any issues.

Positive

The initial setup was nothing at all. It was no effort.

It was very easy and very comfortable to complete.

Microsoft 365 has multiple packages. I use the auxiliary version. We can deploy all of them in 10 to 15 minutes maximum, but it depends on the internet speed as well.

I completed the deployment and implementation myself. It doesn't require any help.

It could be a little less expensive.

You have the option of 1TB of storage per user, or you can keep it on your desktop or laptop.

I can create documents in Microsoft Office and fill them in PDF. I use Adobe quite extensively. Between them, I don't need anything.

There is no other alternative, except maybe Google.

Overall, I am very satisfied with this product and I recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.