Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

Microsoft Teams, without a shadow of doubt, is the best platform ever. 

It is also very stable with a lot of options.

They should simplify breakout rooms a bit. Breakout rooms are probably the most important factor. They have done some work on breakout rooms, but they probably have to do a bit more to make them simpler.

I have been using this solution for the last eight years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. Currently, we have over 1,200 users. We are also rolling it out to students, and our number of users will roughly be from 3,500 to 4,000. These users will be across the globe at the following locations: Geneva, Paris, London, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Hyderabad in India, Maputo in Mozambique, Mombasa in Kenya, and few locations in Canada and the US.

Their technical support is extremely good. They walk you through, and if needed, they are happy to talk to you for a couple of hours. It doesn't matter whether it is the middle of the night or early morning.

For students, we have been using Google Suite, but they are no match with Microsoft. So, we are moving out. A limitation of Google is that it is not present at every location. They were able to deploy it for India and Kenya, but for Mozambique, after trying for six months, they refused. They asked for a lot of information, and we gave them all the information. They kept us waiting for six months, and then they came back and said, "No, sorry, we can't provide." That was very disheartening.

In terms of support, Google is no match with Microsoft. Google probably doesn't provide support.

Its installation is so simple. You just have to turn the service on from the global account, and then a user can just log in to his or her account and download and install it. A user doesn't need support. There is, of course, a bit of difference from user to user, but generally, it is fairly simple. You could just click Next and do it yourself. It takes less than five minutes.

I have done it myself, and I have also seen non-IT users doing it themselves.

Our licensing is annual. We have a Volume Licensing deal with them.

We straight away went to Microsoft.

I would recommend this solution without a shadow of doubt. I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a ten out of ten.

We use the mail client, and we use PowerPoint 365 and Word 365 to produce documents, offers, and documents for our customers.

It helped a lot, especially with all of us working from the home office and still practically being as though we were at work in the office. That's what helped most.

The ongoing and fast development and integration with teams have been valuable features.

The cost for licensing is reasonable.

Microsoft 365 Business is stable and scalable, and the installation is straightforward as well.

Ongoing better integration would be good. It's still not fully consistent among all the platforms running on Windows and IOS. It's getting better and better, but there's still a lot of consolidation or integration work to be done.

More easily accessible training modules would be good to have. They exist, but you have to search for them. Ongoing user support and ongoing learning and education in the product, without being offensive, and making that access easier would be a big advantage over today's product. It should not be an aggressive offering, but it should be easy to find so that we don't have to dig for it.

I've been using Microsoft 365 Business for about 5 years.

With a few exceptions, that are actually lower than they used to be when Microsoft 365 Business was run on-premises, it is very stable.

We are a company of over 1,000 people, so we don't have any scalability problems. I have been in a mid-sized company or at the lower end of an enterprise with 10,000 people, and we had no scalability issues at all.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The licensing cost is reasonable.

I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.

There are still a lot of companies, especially small ones, that still rely on on-premises or on a small partner that delivers old style Windows Office environments hosted somewhere locally. I would really encourage all of them to move to Microsoft 365, maybe coached or managed by a third-party. I would suggest that they think in this new style and help and support the use of Microsoft 365, an IT commodity, and not think the old way that it has to be installed and maintained the old way.

We are using the product primarily for all of our internal documentation and exchanges. The use cases are nothing special. It's quite basic for the most part.

The fact that it's completely on the cloud is one of its most useful aspects. We do not have to manage anything. 

We use the Office and Teams mostly. They are very helpful applications for our office.

The solution is very easy to use. It's completely transparent and extremely easy to navigate.

The stability is quite good. 

We found the installation to be very simple.

The solution offers good security and compliance.

From time to time we have some issues with OneDrive. OneDrive is not perfect. It's nice, however, from time to time we have some problems specifically with reloading the replication. We have to set it up again and again. It's not very stable.

The technical support process could be a bit more secure. The information should stay within the ticketing system itself and not be passed via email.

We've been using the solution for three years or so. We've used it for a while now.

The solution has proven to be quite stable. Its performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze on us. 

We don't really scale the solution. We're a pretty small company. We're only three users, and therefore do not need to scale at all. Therefore, I can't really speak to its capabilities. However, in the future, we are likely to expand usage.

I've only had one experience with technical support. It was not for me. It was for one of the customers. However, the experience was really, really good. 

Once it was finished, they ask for feedback. Technical support was perfect, however, the ticketing system was not that great. Once you've created a ticket, all the next steps are through email. Yet, if there is an email or something which is private, it should not be sent by email. That's why they have to improve the ticketing process. They should send a link to your ticket via email and always keep the information itself within the ticketing system.

The company is quite new. Before I was working at a bigger company which was completely different. However, when we started this new business, we decided to make it as simple as possible for us. That's why we decided to move to the cloud completely.

We also use Zoho for the cloud, for all our accounting, and invoicing, and so on. There is no Microsoft offering for that. It's completely separate. There is no link between them.

The initial setup is not difficult or overly complex. It's pretty straightforward and simple. 

The deployment is quick and only takes a few clicks. Implementation is only a few minutes. From an end-user point of view, it's even faster as it's just a click or two.

We don't need anyone to handle deployment or maintenance.

We handle the implementation ourselves. We have an IT team and we are quite capable of managing the implementation. Therefore we don't need the assistance of any integrators or consultants.

We have a license that we pay on a monthly basis.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Microsoft.

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution.

We are like customers. Even if we do not sell these kinds of services, when customers ask us for advice, we recommend them to move to Microsoft. One of our business lines is in GDPR. For that, we recommend them to move to something which is completely secure. Microsoft Office 365 is one of them. We recommend customers move to Office 365 for that reason. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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.

I am not a technical person, I am from the sales side and more on the commercial side of things. Our company is in Mozambique and we are the main Dell EMC repair center and service provider.  

My main use case for Office 365 is really to type documents with Word, to prepare presentations with the PowerPoint, and also to do spreadsheets with Excel. The product in the suite that I use the most is Word. PowerPoint and Excel to a somewhat lesser extent. But I do use all three frequently.  

We also resell the product so we do deployments for our customers as well.  

With Office, the interface is now more user-friendly than the previous versions of Microsoft Office. The functionality and ability to work offline are also great. There are more helpful tools in the interfacer now. For example, if you are working with Excel and you are typing a formula, Office 365 gives you tips as you work if you do something wrong. It will identify what is wrong and then you can apply the corrections. Things like that make the product more intuitive and helpful. The previous version did not have that kind of help to this extent. So, the most valuable features are the ability to work offline, the ability to have tips when writing formulas, and the improved more user-friendly interface.  

I believe one thing I enjoy more about the experience of using the product is that it now the basic features that I use most frequently are easier to find, access, and manage. This helps to make my work easier and speed up productivity.  

Microsoft could still work on the bandwidth used with Office 365. It does not seem to behave the same depending on the networks that I am working on. Sometimes I can tell the program uses more or less bandwidth and actually measure the difference. I believe that this can be enhanced to be independent of the network that I am working on. The bandwidth consumption should always be about the same.  

Some features of specific products could be more user-friendly. For instance, in Excel, some functionalities like the Pivot tables are not always so easy to use. Right now if you want to create a new formula, you need to have some knowledge about programming in Visual Basic. It does not seem to me that this should be a requirement. So you can type a command and then set up a new formula that is not listed on standard functions supplied with Excel. For users who do not understand the basics of programming and VBA, that really becomes an impossible mission. They may know that they can create a formula and what they might want it to do but they do not know how to do it. So if they do not find the formula in what is provided, then they really have to forget using Excel for that type of solution. If they knew how to do the programming they can do virtually anything through Excel, but they need to have the ability to do the programming and develop the formula. It does not really have to be that way. Microsoft could expand those capabilities.  

One final issue we have has to do with the backups. Microsoft does not assure the backups of the information that you store at their data centers. So besides deploying Office 365 as a solution, you also need a backup solution specifically for Office 365 on the cloud. We definitely recommend Office 365, but unfortunately in our country — specifically for the public companies — it is not easy to sell because we have some strict policies and regulations regarding data. Public companies cannot store information outside of the country. So, since Microsoft Office 365 is a Cloud product some public companies can not go for that option. They still have to work with previous versions of the product. Private sector companies do not have this type of restriction. We can only recommend the product when interested customers can do it within the proper guidelines.  

I have been using Office 365 for about one year now.  

Office 365 is a stable product. Besides the issues with the bandwidth use where sometimes the product uses more bandwidth depending on the network, it performs well and it is very stable and very reliable.  

We have done sales and installations for SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) as well as for enterprise companies. The issues with scalability would be budget and Internet bandwidth. If the money is there it is not an issue.  

My technicians deal with Microsoft support if they have to. Mostly they will take care of issues themselves. They have a dedicated contact and a direct portal for support purposes. So that is great. If a technician needs to open a ticket for a customer, the technician can open himself and go straight to the support portal to log the tickets and carry on from there. In terms of response time, I am not exactly sure because I am not directly involved.  

Previously, I was using Microsoft on a version from 2016. So it really is not a complete switch of products as it is still the Microsoft solution. It is just a newer version.  

I do not think the installation was easy but that is because we have around a hundred users. I did not manage the installation, but I heard from the technical guys that it is generally easier than the previous versions. We signed an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. With that, we got the keys and we got the centralized management panel from where we deploy the Office on all the endpoints. So this made it easier. For the previous versions, the technical guy had to go to each user machine to make the installation through a compact disc. But with volume licensing installation is centralized and the IT manager deployed remotely to the endpoints.  

We handle the setup and the deployment in house. We have a separate team with more-or-less 30 technicians. Some of them are specifically certified on Microsoft products through the partnership that we have with Microsoft. So, depending on the infrastructure that our customer has, we can send out as many as three technicians if it is to be deployed for say 200 users. When we need to do a mailbox migration, most of them have to be migrated at the same time. In that case, we allocate two to three technicians to do it as quickly as possible. If we are talking about enterprise companies with 1000 users — depending on what the customer requires in terms of delivery time — we might allocate as many as 20 guys. It is more likely we will allocate 10 guys. It basically depends on the customer's requirements.  

The pricing for the product is a bit of a tricky question. In terms of the total cost of ownership, I can say that it is expensive. It is a fair price, but in our country or another country with economies similar to  Mozambique, the pricing structure may be a little high and prohibitive. The first issue is the volatility of the exchange rate because our currency, the Metical, is very volatile related to the dollar. The problem here is the customer has an agreement and when he realized that he wants to add some other applications or services or something else, he has the expectation of price based on what he signed on the first agreement. But when he sees the new price, it could become a lot higher than expected because of the exchange rate. It would be nice if somehow Microsoft had some flexibility with the initial agreement so that pricing would not fluctuate dramatically because of the exchange rate.  

Another thing that factors into the pricing is that the Internet connection and Internet bandwidth is still very expensive here in Mozambique. So it is not always an easy decision to make the migration to Office 365 due to these two variables.  

I recommend the Microsoft Office 365 product to clients. We are able to do proofs-of-concept with clients who are interested and carry forward from there.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Office 365 as eight-and-a-half.  

The main thing we use the solution for is being able to outsource everything in the cloud while having the Exchange hosted. Having the Exchange and not having to manage the server and being able to deploy it wherever we have to is useful. We did have a number of people that traveled frequently prior to COVID. We have a handful of people that work out of their homes in various parts of the country, so having solutions that were accessible via the cloud was sort of a direction we started to migrate to several years ago in the Office 365 environment. 

The solution ensured we would never have to be premise dependent so it didn't matter where we or our employees were, or if something happened to the office. If we didn't have access to the office, we still had that access to all of our tools. We're very much a small firm so we use a lot of software services versus building our own things. We like using things that are already made.

The two biggest value adds of the solution are having the ability to outsource the email and not having to manage the email server. It's just seamless. Having the most current versions all around and having things updating frequently by themselves ensures that everybody's got access to the same software. 

In the past, we had a lot of problems with who was updated and so forth. It eliminates that problem and allows us to put it on multiple devices. It's a pretty good offering from that respect.

The ability to manage the updates a little better would be helpful. Sometimes end-users will get a prompt in the middle of the day that they have to update. When there's a new update, then their system automatically starts to reboot, which can be ill-timed. Having a little more control over that would probably be welcome. Notices in regards to updates and being able to manage the timing around them or to be able to do it at off-times would be helpful.

As we get into SharePoint and so forth, they could do a better job of giving you some guidance on the very basics as to how to get started. They have a lot of stuff when you're using it, so getting some foundational knowledge as to what to consider when laying it out and how to approach it would be helpful.

We've been using the solution for more than five years. I can't remember exactly when we originally implemented it.

The stability is very good. It's been very stable and I haven't had any outages or things of that nature, so I'm pleased with it.

We're a small company, however, I'm familiar with other users at larger companies and they've been very pleased with the scalability. Especially people that I've talked to noted that all of a sudden this became the main thing that they were using during this work from home social distancing trend. I've heard a lot of positives about that, which is one of the reasons that we're looking to implement Teams and we're just trying to get some information on the right way to do it.

Therefore, we're hoping to expand into Teams and SharePoint and use more of those tools. We started out with the basics and we use it enterprise-wide. We're hoping that we can continue to expand into it as much as possible.

I've had very limited access to technical support. Mostly, our IT team handles any issues. Therefore, I can't really speak to the quality of there service, as I've never really dealt with them.

The initial setup wasn't complex. It was mostly straightforward. We had a few hiccups with getting emails. It wasn't as seamless as it should have been with the initial setup of the user's email so that took a lot of one on one work with our IT staff who were constantly working with the end-users to get the phone and computer and everything all connected. However, since the original deployment, setting up new employees has been better.

The problem for us was that the automatic setup didn't work the way it should have. Typically, you just put in the password and it automatically sets everything up. IT had to go in and tweak things on people's accounts. From my perspective, and again, this was five, six, seven years ago, I remember it was more of an issue with how Microsoft reacted as opposed to what we were doing.

We do monthly billing, however, I'm not sure what the exact costs are. We may pay around $1,000/month.

We started using the Microsoft Teams and we've started doing the conference call feature, so that's another $4 an account and we have a few accounts using that right now.

We're Microsoft customers. We aren't resellers or consultants.

We have a fairly robust version of the solution, although I don't recall the exact version number offhand. 

In terms of what I would advise other organizations, I would say it's worthwhile and I would do it as quickly as you can because for what you get, it's a really good bang for the buck while being pretty easy to use. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.