Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) Reviews

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. 

Not a lot of our company's clients actually get Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) implemented in their IT environments.

My company's clients use Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) for email protection.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a one-stop shop going through Microsoft. You don't have to worry about additional out-of-the-box features since the solution already offers a very good amount of basic protection or security for your emails. Most of our clients are small-sized businesses, so it suits them fine.

Our company faces difficulty with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) because it's too big, clunky, and difficult for a small client to implement quickly and easily. Microsoft's competitors work a lot better since their products come out of the box directly, and one needs to turn them on to make them work. Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) requires a lot of configuration, support, and management. The aforementioned areas can be considered for improvement.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP) for five years. I work at an IT support company that resells, implements, and offers support for Microsoft products.

My company hasn't faced any stability issues with the solution.

My company hasn't had the need to use the solution's scalability, but I believe that it is a scalable product.

My company works with small to medium-sized businesses, where even among the medium-sized ones, we prefer the smaller ones.

In general, my company is happy with Microsoft support, and we haven't needed support specifically for Microsoft Exchange Online Protection (EOP).

I rate the technical support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of the solution does not consist much of installing it, but meeting the needs of our company's clients. The setup phase requires quite a bit of planning.

There is no standard amount of time taken when it comes to the deployment of the solution. After our company's clients are prepared to make payments toward the solution, it takes around four hours to deploy the solution.

The solution falls on the higher or more expensive side of the spectrum.

The maintenance of the solution is neither too easy nor too difficult. The maintenance is not so easy because what tends to happen is things get set up, and those decisions don't get revisited regularly. There needs to be some process where the settings, decisions, and configurations get reviewed to determine whether they still meet the company's clients' needs regularly.

The solution can be more beneficial for medium and large-sized businesses compared to the smaller ones.

I rate the overall solution a six out of ten.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection's use case can be email collaboration, data protection from various threats such as phishing or malware, and deploying anti-spam policies and anti-malware policies to ensure user safety. Additionally, the attack simulation and training features within the solution can be used to train end users across different campaigns happening over the internet. Other features like saved attachments, saved documents, and disabling options in Microsoft Exchange Online Protection can also be utilized.

The pre-set policies and configuration analyzer are the most valuable features in my opinion. The configuration analyzer is a great function to bring about strong external protection, and one can either turn on the pre-set policies or take help from the configuration analyzer to get recommendations for better protection.

One area that could be improved is handling gray emails, which are emails with attachments or newsletters that are not necessarily malicious, but are coming from different providers and are being received by various customers. Microsoft Exchange Online Protection may not be fully capable of stopping these emails until submitted for investigation over a specific period of time by Microsoft experts. This process needs improvement.

I have been working with the product for approximately six years.

The stability of this solution is quite good. It's been working well for a long time. Microsoft is constantly updating it and adding more features. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

I would rate its scalability a seven out of ten. There are certain restrictions. When you're using a Microsoft product solution, you can scale it, but if you're not, there are limitations.

If a company is doing business transactions, sending and collaborating, or choosing teams, I suggest they use Exchange Online Protection. But it may not be enough for any organization that is doing its best, as many threats are happening through different communication channels. I suggest using Office 365 as well, which comes with more advanced functionalities.

The experience with customer service from Microsoft varies. For example, if you open a ticket and get good engineers or support representatives, the experience is obviously good. It really depends on the quality of the support you receive. Overall, my experience has been average. Sometimes I get very bad responses from engineers or developers who don't understand the service or may not be properly trained on it. It can be hard for someone like me to explain everything so that they can understand the problem, and they may need to consult their team or do some research before providing a solution. These things take time. But if you get a good representative who is knowledgeable, then the experience is very smooth.

The initial setup is very simple. There are certain policies within the environment that will do the job automatically if you don't do anything. Moreover, every organization has default policies that are automatically applied if you don't do anything, but Microsoft provides documentation if you want to customize the policies. It is easy to work around the default policies if you need to make changes.

EOP is mainly deployed for the public cloud and there is no on-premises version available. However, if an organization has an on-premises email solution, they can choose to connect it to EOP to protect their emails with external protection. Organizations can reroute their emails through EOP so that all inbound and outbound emails go through the EOP solution and get filtered accordingly.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. It is a low-price solution.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Exchange Online Protection a six out of ten. It is a good product. However, it may not meet all the requirements of today's business world. But if you combine it with different solutions in production, then it becomes a lot more effective.

It is an easy solution. It is useful for local users and our company because we use Microsoft 365. It is also free with Microsoft 365.

The security features could be better and more secure in the next release.

We have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have more than 200 users using this solution using Microsoft accounts and emails.

The deployment was easy. We have a hybrid solution. We have Exchange, we have Office 365, and we can create Office 365 users. So if we want to create with Exchange, we can also do that. And all our incoming emails go through Office 365 Online Protection.

We've used technical support a few times, and they've helped us.

The initial setup was straightforward. It has already established standards that are configured.

The solution has annual licensing.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Microsoft EOP's most valuable feature is a shared mailbox. 

The solution needs to improve its backup. 

I rate the tool's stability a ten out of ten. 

Microsoft EOP is scalable. 

The tool's deployment is straightforward. You need to get a license to use the product. 

I rate Microsoft EOP a ten 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. 

The reason for the use of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is that the solution is native to Microsoft Exchange.

It is easy to configure, easy to use, easy to add exclusions, easy to track, and easy to add anything else if you want.

We have come across cases pointing out that if one is not registered with DKIM on the solution, certain features don't work. Also, tools don't work if you do not register your SPF. So, the aforementioned areas should be considered for improvement. That's why one needs to configure the tenant perfectly. After that, the features and security tools can be used nicely. Also, If one could have any other email gateway that is not working and acts as a secondary gateway on your tenant, then it would be a helpful update. As I see right now, there is no such feature update on Microsoft 365's roadmap. So, such changes can lower the cost of licenses. The solution can be made cheaper.

I have experience with Microsoft Exchange Online Protection for fourteen months. My customers have been using the solution for three years. A lot of customers changed their antiviruses to Microsoft Defender. We are consultants and not resellers. We give samples of Microsoft products, and our customers decide what is what. Owing to budget, our customers opted for Microsoft Defender. Also, there is no version of Microsoft Exchange Online Protection.

The product could be more stable. Microsoft products could be more stable because sometimes, even though they are updating some things, we cannot find those updates. Sometimes, they change their UI, and since we are not made aware of it fully, we keep searching for the new UI feature. Sometimes they also depreciate some of the features. At times, there are new viruses being introduced, and they need time to adjust the viruses.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten. My clients range from small to very large enterprise-sized businesses. One of our clients has five million users, while some of our clients have a hundred and fifty users. So it varies extensively.

Microsoft support is the worst. If you are in a hurry, they don't address your issues. As a consultant, my problems are level two and above, not level one. We are creating cases and tickets while level-one issues are coming to us, which is a time-consuming thing. We do not have any time to spend on such issues. It's their job to manage us, but we can solve the level one problem. Maybe we can solve the level two problem as well, but we have to start from zero again and again. Also, sometimes they go on holiday for one month maybe, and we are our cases. So, we keep waiting. It takes too much time to get to a support partner. I rate the technical support a three out of ten.

Negative

The solution's initial setup process was easy. Even a finance employee can do the setup.

Those with previous experience can deploy it in one hour. If you need to check the documents and check the videos, then it may take two or three days to deploy the solution. Only one engineer is required for deployment.

Maintenance is required because sometimes it doesn't work. If you have not registered to DKIM or SPF, you cannot use the solution on the cloud. If you delete it somehow, you cannot use the solution. Hence, you need to check the solution regularly. So, it is not Microsoft's problem. It's your problem. So, it's a tenant-owner problem, so you need to check them.

I am the only person involved in maintaining the solution.

My clients have deployed the solution on public and hybrid clouds.

The solution is very expensive right now.

On some occasions, it's cheap compared to the Microsoft Defender. If I check online, its prices can be made a little bit lower. On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is very expensive, I rate the pricing a six. For licensing, we can make monthly or yearly payments. Right now, we pay 5 USD per month to secure a person's license.

Microsoft Exchange Online Protection is easily accessible. Also, it's easy to use and configure. The solution offers a user-friendly UI, and tracking incidents becomes effortless. It provides the convenience of easily monitoring specific aspects and utilizing KQL to track any additional requirements. Considering these advantages, I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.