Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) Reviews

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection has features like DLP (data loss protection), Safe Attachment, and Safe Links. Also, it has a Litigation Hold feature that is useful for email protection in cases where emails are deleted because of mishandling.

If you want extensive email security, you need to purchase a Plan 2 license. Plan 1 and Plan 2 are the two plans for Microsoft Exchange Online Protection. Some customers hesitate to purchase this product because it adds some costs to them, which is necessary for them. It would be helpful for customers if Plan 1 features were included with EOP. However, they still need to purchase Plan 2 for advanced security features.

One of our clients recently requested to compare Zimbra's features with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection. Zimbra is open source, while Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is not. When I compare both the products, many free features are available in Zimbra because it is open-source software.

It makes no sense to request Microsoft Exchange Online Protection add all the features people get on open-source software like Zimbra. Hence, I would say whatever features Microsoft Exchange Online Protection has are enough. Microsoft has a dedicated research team that should research and add new techniques like phishing and spamming solutions to the product.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection since January 2000. I work as a Microsoft distributor.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is a stable product. I have been working with it for the past four or five years, and it is one of the most effective and popular products in our country for email security. Since it has a yearly or monthly subscription, adding Plan 1 to EOP would be very helpful, increasing the product's popularity even more.

As far as I know, and as far as I have worked with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, its scalability is okay enough. I used this solution for small, medium, and large companies.

Since our region is tied to the Indian region, the technical support is okay and supportive. However, it would be more helpful if support is enabled in our country.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection manages too many sites from India, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. Sometimes they experience too many hiccups, except for severity-level cases. The technical support team responds according to the SLA, but sometimes they break it. A support center in Bangladesh would be very helpful for us.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection a seven or eight out of ten for its technical support.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is much easier to deploy. We have faced issues with platform-to-platform migrations, such as Zimbra to Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, GoDaddy to Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, and Google G Suite to Microsoft Exchange Online Protection migrations.

In all of these cases, we have encountered challenges during migration. If we get migration support from Microsoft, we can increase our sales by 10 to 20%.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection's pricing is a little bit more because its price has recently increased. The product's price should be reduced by at least 10% because it's software, and they're just recovering their costs. If you sell 100 units with a profit of $5 for each unit, you make $500 in profits. However, if you reduce the profit to $3 for each unit and sell 1,000 units, you make a higher profit of $3000.

Even if they lose some revenue, their product reach will improve because there are many customers in Bangladesh. If Microsoft Exchange Online Protection reduces its price, its users will increase. The approximate licensing cost of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection varies depending on different packages.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection has lots of features. The solution offers a zero draft model, which is the most robust model for email security, identity protection, and endpoint security. According to the Gartner report, it's a good product. Microsoft Exchange Online Protection's product and client feedback is very good. The solution's price should be reduced, and Plan 1 features should be included with Exchange Online Protection.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection nine and a half out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for security.

The solution is user-friendly.

It's easy to deploy. There are not many hassles throughout the process. Anybody can just read up on it and deploy it. 

It's all running in the backend, so it doesn't affect the app functionality.

The dashboard is very simple. 

The solution is stable.

It can scale. 

The product needs more granularity.

Some features, like encryption, are not available. 

I've used the solution for less than two years. 

It is definitely stable. I have not seen any issues. We know that Azure or AWS, once in a while, have some outages. Every product has got its own outages. Considering that, I have not seen much of an issue with Azure, at least with the Exchange Online Protection.

There are some small limitations, and you cannot really scale mailboxes beyond 100GB. The customer will need to understand that you cannot really scale in that sense. You will have to archive your mailbox and archive your data. Beyond that, it is scalable. 

I personally do not deal with Exchange Online Protection. One of my other team members does. They did contact Microsoft for various issues. For example, the limitations around the 100GB mailbox. They wanted to know if they wanted to migrate that, how long it would take, or if they could increase the 100GB mailbox. 

Microsoft helped tell them the exact answers. However, it depends on the customer to customer. Some customers have got premium support, so they get more straightforward answers. 

In general, support has been good.

I'm also using Microsoft Defender.

We've also used Proofpoint. Proofpoint has more granularity. It also offers different features. 

Exchange Online and Defender offer safe attachments and anti-malware. However, they just have one single option for features, and you check a box, and it enables one blanket policy. With Proofpoint, you can choose your options.

Microsoft products are good and more user-friendly in general. They are just missing the granularity aspect.

In Proofpoint, the tap and trap work very well, and it has some kind of monitoring as well for the tap and trap.

When you're moving from Proofpoint to Microsoft, if you need to do a comparison and if you need to showcase to the customer all features are working as expected, some functionalities might be a little difficult for us to showcase. Maybe that dashboard will differ. It's a common dashboard that we have for Microsoft. Maybe Proofpoint has got more features, however, for use cases, it'll be a little difficult to demonstrate to the customer.

We've moved to this solution since we were moving the majority of our products to Azure. We wanted to move to the cloud to reduce hardware costs and avoid having a separate server, which we do not need for Exchange. 

It's easy to set up the solution. For an Exchange person, or anybody who has worked on Microsoft on-prem Exchange, it is pretty easy for to deploy the Exchange Online Protection. They will have to learn Microsoft 365 Defender as well since it's got a lot more functionalities, including threat explorer. It has got more granularity in the investigations. In any case, anybody who has worked on Microsoft on-prem Exchange will be able to do a setup, which should not be a big problem.

How long it takes is purely based on how many mailboxes you have got. It also depends upon the mailbox size as well. In a lot of cases what happens is you'll have to migrate from on-prem to Exchange Online, O 365, and you'll have to migrate the mailboxes. That process all depends upon the mailbox size as well, although getting into Exchange Online will not take much time. They can directly change the MX record and do a lot of things pretty easily, in maybe less than a week's time. For moving mailboxes to the public cloud, maybe a company will have to run it in hybrid environments for some time, then slowly move the mailboxes and complete the configuration. A lot of functionalities are there in Azure, Microsoft O 365, and Exchange Online Protection in general. 

Setting up Exchange Online is easy at the beginning, however, completing the configuration, it'll take time based on my experience. If it is a very small company, and if they're maintaining a mailbox size of around 10GB or 5GB, something like that, and they've got hardly 100 mailboxes or less than that, it'll take less time. However, I've seen a few customers where the mailbox size is huge, and it takes time, maybe up to six months.

I don't have details surrounding pricing. 

We have a partnership with Microsoft.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

If a company wanted to use this solution, I would advise them to check their mailboxes and consider what functionalities they want to have. When they move to Exchange Online Protection, it has got all the functionalities, anti-malware, anti-phishing, et cetera, and all those features are definitely available. And if they want something user-friendly, it is definitely there. It can also be deployed quickly, so that's one of the core advantages of having the Microsoft product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. The simplicity and the easy deployment ensure that anybody who has worked on Exchange can easily work on this. There's no specific training needed to get started. And, with a basic E3 license, they get Exchange Online Protection. It's just missing granularity.

Our company uses the solution to provide customers with threat management. We group emails or policies from DLP, configure them, and resolve alerts. 

Customers have multiple teams who are responsible for managing the solution's features. For example, a customer might have security and DevOps teams with an engineering team just to manage email. Across all management teams, there might be up to fifty users. Companywide, the solution is used by every employee because it is associated with email. 

The threat management feature includes policies and alerts that are valuable. 

The solution is expensive.

Performance and speed should continue to be improved. Microsoft is in a state of constant modifications to ensure their engines always perform. They have the budget and longevity to to know what they need to continue doing without outside advice. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable with no issues. 

The solution is scalable to any customer needs. Internally, we don't have plans to scale. 

I contacted technical support for issues with Azure permissions. I wanted to understand the readable permissions required to see entire subscriptions if you are not an organization's domain administrator. They reached out to me pretty quickly, their approach was okay, and they resolved my issue. 

I rate support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The setup is straightforward. 

We implement the solution for customers. 

The solution is expensive but is backed by Microsoft's reputation. 

Some companies have difficulty with billing because they are surprised by ongoing costs. For example, you might purchase a package but then realize you need other things. Microsoft might alert you of security issues but when you try to reconfigure, you find that you have to pay for the feature. If you already have an agreement for $500,000 it is difficult to add $500,000 to do things the best way. 

The cloud version is more expensive than on-premises but it resolves any scalability issues. The cloud's purpose is to always be available without any work. 

Microsoft delivers the whole package in one solution. It manages servers, domain controls, security, firewalls, WAF, EDR, antiviruses, proxies, and email. In the future, there will be firewalls for email. 

I use Proofpoint as a security solution on top of Microsoft. From a security and IT perspective, it is always good to have multiple vendors. An entire environment with Microsoft solutions might have a gap. 

In my experience, everyone is using Azure or solutions from Microsoft. Word, Excel, and Outlook are present for a majority of companies. There is very little on the Google platform for email. 

The solution's discussion is more about budget and whether you are going to choose the on-premises or the cloud version. 

Microsoft is huge and a top-three vendor that really only competes with AWS and maybe Oracle. Certain features like scalability really are not relevant because the company's reputation is more than enough. Age in the market and investments in security are more important. You can rest assured that Microsoft has a particular team dedicated to each feature or issue. They are always improving and always delivering. 

Certain features of the solution will be valuable based on your role. For example, I am part of the security team so threat management is interesting to me. An an engineer or email team might be more interested in policies, configuration, or the administrative exchange. 

Nothing is perfect but the solution is very good. When you don't have opponents, it is easier to achieve a good rating. I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for all our customers. Microsoft doesn't give you a preconfigured solution like other vendors. Microsoft has come out of that plug-and-play concept, and for every product, you need to reconfigure and fine-tune it according to your needs.

With Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, if malware is attached to a mailer, it's very easy to go into the incident alert and find out what's happening with that identity and the mail.

If a company wants to put in line back-to-back anti-spam solutions, they need to work on that part because Microsoft recommends either you use EOP as a front line or you don't use it. Microsoft Exchange Online Protection needs to work on this shortcoming.

Microsoft needs to redo its pricing regarding Microsoft Exchange Online Protection because every customer who buys Microsoft 365 needs Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for around four to five years.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection ten out of ten for stability.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection an eight out of ten for scalability. Around 70,000 users use Microsoft Exchange Online Protection in our organization.

Microsoft's technical support is much better than other vendors. However, Microsoft engineers need to be guided. For example, if I tell Microsoft's EOL team about a certificate issue, I need to let them know about the issue and the article I'm talking about, and then they will fix it for me.

Since I come from an Exchange background, Microsoft Exchange Online Protection's initial setup is simple.

At times, when we are doing URL whitelisting, we raise it to the support, and Microsoft removes one feature of whitelisting.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection a nine out of ten.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection protects remote and on-site users against email-based threats. 

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection guards against threats regardless of whether our users are in the office. If you receive an email with a malicious link, the solution will warn you against opening it. 

The solution uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, so you don't need train it to detect something. The detection and response times are short. It's an excellent product.

Microsoft should publicize the solution more because it isn't well known. I appreciate the solution because it does a lot of things that I used to do manually. I didn't realize something like this existed. I went to Symantec, Trend Micro, and other providers, but Microsoft had the only solution to my problems. 

I would like to get reports about vulnerable connections from our clients with information about domains, public IPs, etc. That would be highly useful.

I have used Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for two years.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection nine out of 10 for stability.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection 10 out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Microsoft support eight out of 10.

Positive

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is easy to set up.

We have seen a return on our investment. 

The solution is fairly priced.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection nine out of 10. 

We use the solution in all our environments. We use it for remedy tickets and give them updates. It was our main communication point. 

The solution can be complex at times. It would be nice to have the on-server version. It needs to improve the stability as well. 

I have been working with the product for seven years. 

The tool is scalable and it helps us to add/remove new users, servers, clusters, etc. 

The solution's setup is complex and it took us months to complete the deployment. 

We did the product's deployment in-house. 

We have seen an ROI with the tool's use. 

The solution's pricing is subscription-based rather than a yearly licensing cost. Pricing is based on the size of the environment and company and can be expensive. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. 

We use it for email protection. 

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is very good when it comes to anti-phishing and anti-malware. And the fact that it has an impersonation feature for the domain as well as users.

The reporting needs a little bit of improvement. When you compare it to Mimecast features and data porting tools, it's less superior compared to EOP.

Another area of improvement could be pricing. So Exchange Online Protection has a higher price compared to its competitors.

I've been working with it for over three years now.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. The scalability is pretty good; it does what it is supposed to do. I haven't encountered many issues because Microsoft regularly updates its product.

We're just over 650 users in our company using this solution.

The customer service and support have been really helpful. Whenever we raise a support ticket with them, they respond in a timely manner, and almost 99.9% of the time, issues are resolved.

Positive

I have used MessageLabs in the past, and I would say that EOP is better than MessageLabs in terms of the interface and ease of use. 

The initial setup is easy. Moreover, it is easy to maintain. The deployment model is cloud-based, but we are in a hybrid environment. So it does protect our on-premises environment as well.

The initial deployment was done by our IT team. In our IT department, I would say roughly 12 people are required for maintenance.

It's a high price. When comparing it to Microsoft Defender and Mimecast, it is more expensive. 

I would definitely require using this solution. Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We use our company's Microsoft Exchange Online Protection as a spam filter, virus protection, and malware protection.

I find the solution's filtering and malware protection features to be the most valuable ones.

Other users wish to see the encryption feature added to the solution in the future.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for three or four years. My company has used it for a longer time. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using. My company is an end customer of the solution.

The solution's stability is very, very good. I didn't face any problems in the last year.

Between 50 and 100 users are using the solution in my company. At the moment, we have three administrators for the solution. Normally, I am the one working on the solution. I am not sure whether I am going to increase the solution's usage in the future. At the moment, we are still going strong with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.

I haven't contacted technical support. It has been a really long time since I contacted Microsoft technical support. So, it has been more than thirteen or fourteen years. I have no idea how it is today. A long time ago, it was very good.

It was deployed long before I got over the task in my company, so I wasn't a part of the deployment process.

My boss told me that he checked an alternative for Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, maybe because of the cost, which I am not sure. I don't know how much we pay for this. My boss looks after the payment part. So, Mimecast was the other solution he was considering as an alternative. Mimecast could be much more expensive or much cheaper, but I have no idea. So my boss asked me to check out Mimecast and see if there's any difference. In my opinion, there is no big difference between Microsoft Exchange Online Protection and Mimecast. They both are reliable and work quite well. As we are now running with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for years, I don't see the need to switch over to Mimecast.

I am satisfied with the overall product. It wasn't easy or intuitive enough for me to start using it. So, the reason was that the solution changed. I started to work with it shortly after it changed from the servers and changed to another part of Azure network. It was not quite easy, but it was okay for me since I'm used to such problems and switching over to other problems.

Our team was responsible for everything in our company, but since I started using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection, it's much easier for me as an administrator.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

The product's end-of-life cycle could be extended. When it gets upgraded, we should receive some incentives. For example, someone who has purchased a Microsoft professional license should be able to renew or upgrade without buying a new product.

There have been some online intrusions on security. If Microsoft packaged the updates more frequently, the protection would be better. If updates take less time, we might receive malicious emails.

Additionally, I would like to see changes in the licensing model. If someone has a corporate license with many users, they should get a better price.

I have been working with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) since 1998.

We could get technical support services directly from Microsoft.

Positive

We use Sophos for email protection. Sophos enhances our accessibility and helps prevent malicious email intrusions.

The product is expensive. 

The email policy configuration options in Microsoft EOP are satisfactory. I recommend it to any user who wants to use Microsoft. 

I rate it a ten out of ten. 

We use Microsoft Exchange Online Protection to secure our users' accounts. For example, we implement MFA on our users' emails to ensure their mailboxes or accounts are secured. Aside from providing the username and password, the solution provides a code or additional security to ensure their accounts are properly secured. We also used a phishing tool.

I want a seamless way of archiving users' emails on Exchange. When a user's emails are archived on the system, we find out their mailbox is large the moment we need to copy those files back. Another issue is with OneDrive, in that if a user has files stored on OneDrive when they exit, the license is removed. As a result, transferring those files to another user is a problem. It should be possible for there to be a central location where each of those files is stored. That way, even after a user leaves and the license is removed, we don't lose access to that information after 90 days.

The solution should protect mailboxes. Most of our users have emails on their mobile, so if a staff member exits from the corporation, we need something that mimics email on the mobile. Some tools delete all of a user's emails and passwords the moment they leave that environment or their employer, but I don't think Microsoft has any such tools. It's important because passwords and sensitive information could pass into the wrong people's hands.

I've used the solution for the last two or three years now.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is very scalable. There are between 350 to 400 users using the solution. There are plans to increase the usage.

We used to use Google Mail before migrating to Exchange.

It is straightforward to deploy the solution. It takes three hours or so to deploy it. We have five people managing the solution.

We pay licensing fees yearly.

Earlier, we had Microsoft Exchange on-prem and then moved to 365.

I recommend the solution to other users because it is easy to start a business. I rate it a five out of ten.