Office 365 Reviews

My use case is mainly the email solution of Office 365. I use the exchange online for my emails, corporate emails. I use OneDrive for saving my data on the internet, and the other good features are Excel, Word and PowerPoint online, which allows me to create online documents. I also sometimes use Microsoft Teams within Office 365. We generally use Teams for our video conference meetings and presentation meetings. We also sometimes use SharePoint to share documents with people outside our organization. I am a cloud security lead and we are users of Office 365. 

What I like most about Office 365 is its reliability and that I haven't experienced any outages, it's always worked fine for me. It also has a unique 'giving' feature in that if I go for Office 365 licensing for a particular license level, Microsoft also offers me other services along with Office 365. 

The product could be improved if there was integration with other single sign-on solutions that are available on the market. I'd also like to see integration with other privileged identity or access management solutions. If there are only particular solutions that we have to go with and other market leaders have other solutions that we'd like, then that becomes costly. If they came up with more access or solution integrations that were less expensive, then that would be helpful.

Microsoft should come up with some documentation or presentation related to specific use cases. There are times when companies or organizations migrate to Office 365, but they are not aware of each and every feature that's available and that they could be using. I think they should have special feature-based training sessions, where information can be shared with users. It can be subdivided into departments whether it's accounting, HR, technical.

I've been using this solution for more than five years. 

I think this is a very stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. You just need to invest in the new added user licenses and get those onboard. It is on your tenant ID, which is already created. So I guess scalability is quite easy in Office 365. You can go in for new licenses every year and easily scale up. My organization currently has between 400-500 users of this product. We have a team of two or three who deal with it. We plan to increase usage and we already give training sessions on usage of this product on a use case basis depending on the department you're working in. 

The technical support is quite good from Microsoft.

We were using G-Suite before this but G-Suite doesn't have the features that Office 365 offers. We have access to Teams, video conferencing, SharePoint and all the other features which is why we thought it was a better solution for us. 

The initial setup was straightforward. I think deployment took around one and a half months. and the strategy was to get a batch of users first migrated to Office 365 and then continue in batches until everyone was on board. We worked directly with Microsoft for the deployment. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

I love this tool. I like the release planning feature and their notifications about upgrades; it makes me feel like an inside partner rather than just a customer.
Some valuable features are

• SharePoint
• Yammer
• Microsoft Planner
• Office 365 (Excel, Access)

Yammer and SharePoint’s social collaboration features have transformed our work style and the way we collaborate with the clients. There’s less of emails tracking and more moving the conversations forward, with greater context in terms of supporting the documents or issues being discussed.

Furthermore, the way that Excel has grown into a data analytics tool/engine with monthly updates is a pleasant surprise.

Task management needs to improve. There still doesn’t seem to be a unified view of my tasks that follows me around from SharePoint to Groups to Yammer to Planner.

Planner seems the best model in terms of functionality, but tracking my personal responsibilities still seems the tiniest bit soiled.

I have been using this solution since 2013.

I have not encountered any stability issues. On some occasions, the service health status reports have indicated issues and resolution timelines, but I don't seem to recall ever feeling, that my services as experienced were either degraded or underperforming.

There were no scalbility issues so far. However, ours is not a large scale enterprise.

The ticketing process is simple and they are responsive. Sometimes they have to get back to me with findings (at times i’ve been surprised having not to expect it to be as complicated enough in order to warrant research) and then the phone tag can begin. Unless the problem is mission-critical or urgent, I let it slide. They might want to consider adding an asynchronous Yammer-like channel for customer support. I know I need a problem fixed, but commandeering time from my day instead of going back and forth about it. It would be really helpful to move the discussion forward without having to have my undivided attention on the support rep and that might be worth investigating into.

I had used Office Professional Pro without the cloud backbone. So, it doesn’t really seem comparable to this product. I have also used and still use the G Suite which is fine, but frankly it doesn’t seem as robust or exciting as the Office 365. I maintain both because some clients are Google people or otherwise have an aversion to MSFT while there are others who know and seem to love the Office 365 solution.

The non-changeable primary tenant DOMAIN.onmicrosoft.com was not explained clearly to me back then. I wound up opening a few instances, instead of adding multiple domains to a tenant. But what still has not been resolved are the branding issues, i.e., if your brand-expressing domains are not intuitively related to each other. For example, there is no mbamoralist.com yammer network b/c my primary domain is succelleratorsaas. If one legitimately owns the domains, one should not be locked into decisions about brand primacy that may have applied at that time but don’t today.

The number of SKUs and the varied configuration that MSFT offers is evidence, that they are segmenting the offers meticulously well.

Google Apps for Work/G Suite that I have used and like as well. I just think that MSFT Office 365 is appreciably a more powerful, detailed and granular tool.

First of all, I was an enthusiastic and an early adopter of this product. Microsoft has made the onboarding process impressively robust and my learning pains back then, would not be those experienced by someone arriving new/fresh today. Still, the primary domain is something that one should give some consideration to, as it’s a lock-in decision.

It is an excellent platform for teamwork. Its raison d'être is the collaboration between the members of a business network. It also enables work material from diverse devices.

Here are some of the valuable features:

• Ease of use with an intuitive environment
• High availability
• Speed of access
• Quick response when requesting support
• Extensive information on the web and from local partners
• Short implementation time
• Quick activation of services

The tools have made a positive impact on our organization. Here are some examples:

• Some meetings no longer need to occur at the different venues of our company. They can use Skype for Business instead.
• Many teams have formed groups through which they share work files. Team members are not necessarily in the same physical location.
• Human resources and communication teams use Yammer for their ads.
• Managers make approvals from their cell phones, thereby making the operation more dynamic. Other services have gradually been incorporated.

I would like to see a little more native documentation in more frequently used languages, such as Spanish.

There is very good documentation of the different modules and components, however, all are in English, and the product is widely distributed in Spanish speaking countries. It would be beneficial if the documentation is also in the second highest language: Spanish.

We have been using this solution for seven months.

Once issue occurred when we moved large mailboxes (greater than 20 GB). That took a considerable amount of time to finalize. However, that could have been a result of the conditions and characteristics of the networks in our country, or our internet provider.

No stability issues for now. All is working out as expected.

No scalability issues for now. All is working out as expected.

Customer service is very good, especially by the local partners who give us advice and first line support. This is also true of the service offered directly by Microsoft.

Technical support has been very good for us so far. Once a support case is opened, we receive a message very quickly that a technician was assigned to us. Within five hours, depending on the urgency of the case, we generally receive some communication in our language to solve the case.

Our previous solutions had of delay of about three years and had not been updated. In addition, they were only offering us mail, calendar, and a poor communication chat.

The change was necessary, given the peculiarities of the existing work in the company. We needed a platform that would allow a more dynamic and real collaboration.

The installation was not complex. Everything required a series of steps and checklists to follow that allowed the implementation to come to a happy conclusion. The concern is to make sure that there are additional resources available when the implementation ends. This could be a high number of resources.

The implementation was done by the vendor team who is a strategic partner for our company for computer projects. The experience was very good. They have a large group of engineers and staff who are certified by Microsoft. They have many facilities in large and medium-sized companies, and they have been very effective.

The licensing and prices are within the average range. They offer a good price for the services that are obtained. In addition, they offer various licensing plans depending on the required services, from the simplest to the most complex and numerous. The cost is proportional to the number of services.

Before making the decision to purchase this solution, other options were reviewed. There were three finalists: Google Apps, IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition, and Office 365.

During the next round, we evaluated the last two options. After about five weeks of running PoCs, we decided to purchase Office 365.

Plan the work that needs to be done well. Ensure that the achievements and actions of physical/human resources are planned in consideration of possible unexpected events. Plan accordingly in terms of communication or connections.

We use it primarily for collaboration across teams. We use it to collaborate either via email or we use Teams quite a lot. For all of our meetings, we are now using Teams. Then we use the planner boards and things in Teams as well for keeping track of the work that we need to do.

It's nice that it's an all-in-one solution and everything is all in one place. 

You can have your meetings, your meeting history, you can record meetings, you've got a place for meeting notes, you can create your task board, or have planner boards, or you can use other tools like Trello within Teams. 

Just the integration that it gives allows us a lot of different other platforms in basically one place, and it's good to have everything at our fingertips if and when we need it.

The one big problem with the solution is if you are presenting in Teams and someone puts their hand up, you don't get a notification. If you are running a meeting and just presenting you don't know that people have their hands up and want to ask a question. 

What I don't like is that not all of the capabilities exist on a chat. You have to have a Teams channel to use, for example, a planner. It would be nice if I could still use a planner board on a chat.

We've been using the solution for more than a year.

The stability of the solution is very good. We use it extensively and have run big meetings with lots of people. It has never crashed or froze on us. There aren't bugs or glitches. We've been quite satisfied with it.

In terms of scalability, we haven't had any issues. We've been using it quite heavily over the last couple of months with lots and lots of people running different meetings at the same time, and lots of people in a single meeting. We haven't had any issues so far in terms of scaling the solution in that sense.

We've got probably about 5,000 people in our organization using it and they vary from technical IT teams to our business unit is across different areas, like marketing, finance, HR, etc. Pretty much the whole organization is using it. I don't think we could possibly increase usage at this point as it's already so pervasive in our organization. That said, we have no plans to move away from it.

If we do have issues, we engage it with our internal support and they would then reach out to the third party support. Therefore, I don't know what that support looks like.

We still use Office, or Outlook, for emails. Previously we used that and then we used Slack for collaboration instead of Teams.

Teams obviously has more integration with other tools. Slack had the chat capability and it allowed us to have meetings, however, it didn't record meetings and it didn't have a meeting history section. You weren't able to see everyone in the meeting. Again, you didn't have the planner boards and all the other widgets that you can integrate with from a Team's point of view. Teams is more usable and has a lot more features. It's just one place where everything's captured. When we'd use Slack and we'd use Trello, they were separate tools, and information was in two different places. Teams basically gives you Slack and Trello together, along with so many other things.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It is very straightforward, in my opinion.

Our central team rolled it out, therefore I wasn't part of the deployment process. I'm not sure how long it took to roll everything out.

I'm not sure how many people are needed to maintain the solution.

I do know our central team rolled it out, however, I'm not sure if we brought on any outside help.

I'm not sure how much our organization pays for licensing.

We're just a customer. We do not have a partnership with Microsoft.

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

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use for the product is for performing office tasks like word processing for critical business staff. I work with the product mostly from the administrative side but also have experience using the product itself.  

Email transmission has greatly improved since we migrated to office 365 , collaboration with SharePoint and Teams  has increased users productivity, downtime is minimal and I.T management is very minimal hence we can concentrate on other I.T tasks. 

The thing I have found most valuable is that the product is quite simple for end-user so there is not much reason to use the product support. The support for users is good and adapting the product from the user's perspective is quite easy.  

The uptime of the solution is quite good, I can say it has about 98 to 99% uptime.  

The product is also easy from the standpoint of administration, especially for the IT team. We have good control over who has access to the program components and what parts they can use. In terms of the IT team, it makes our work quite easy. We do not need to spend too much time monitoring the solution because it is quite good.  

Security-wise, it is also good. There is multi-layer authentication which I think is good from a security standpoint.  

And finally, the reporting is also good.  

One part of the suite that can be improved is their online applications. Those are quite limited compared to the desktop applications and this can make them more difficult to use. That is one area of improvement that Microsoft should address.  

The cost is a big challenge. It is really quite expensive and puts quite a strain on our budget. Because of that, we have to set a limitation on the use of the online application and the distribution of user licenses. If the pricing were more friendly, we might want to get more people using the product.  

The pricing is really the key feature that holds us back from making more and better use of the product.  

I have been using the product for about one year.  

The product is very stable. We only have very rare issues when something goes wrong.  

The scalability of Office 365 is quite good. The cost of the licenses is the main issue when it comes to scalability, not the product itself. We have to try to balance the number of licenses according to the most critical users.  

We do plan to increase usage over time since the company will always grow. As the number of critical users increases, we will need to purchase more licenses.  

So there is the possibility of changing the number of licenses we are using and that would be all we need to do to scale usage with some very minor attention to security issues.  

The technical support is good. Probably the best thing about tech support is that we do not need to be involved with them because the product is stable.  

We previously used on-premise Exchange server , the solution was good but administration of the solution was very time consuming , security was a key concern and downtime was very frequent. 

The initial setup was okay. It was not too complex, but it also was not as straightforward as it might have been.  

We implemented through a Microsoft vendor and their expertise is very good.  

We find that the licensing costs are high enough that it makes us restrict the number of users in our organization.  

We evaluated G-Suite 

The advice I would give to others who are looking into implementing Office 365 is that this solution is a good one for anybody needing a scalable, stable solution with good uptime.  

It is virtually a worry-free solution especially from the standpoint of IT administrators.  

On the scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product as a nine-out-of-ten. I would rate OneDrive as a nine as well.  

My primary use case is for preparing presentations to teach, often on PowerPoint.

I don't distinguish them much at all from what I can get to, just with normal software installed at the desktop. For example, the tool called OneNote, I have not used it because I don't see the need to.

In terms of improvement, it should have tutorials when you first have the opportunity to use it, to be able to really learn it.

It can be complex in the beginning. 

It is on my HP, I've been using it for over 10 years. I don't actively use it. When I log into a faculty, the user interface takes all of us through a portal where Office 365 is the access to Office software. For regular desktop use, I've been using it for three years because I have it on my HP laptop. I am currently using it.

It's on the cloud because no matter what I did with it, saved files would be available on different machines, and sometimes it would be a way to work on PowerPoint and then pull them from that environment when I was at school.

I haven't seen it fail, in any kind of regard.

I didn't use anything that's similar to it. Just a device where all of the software has been individually installed.

The initial setup was not too complex. 

It didn't take any time. It just happened to be working from when I first connected, I did not have to do anything.

On my HP laptop, it came with the computer and it was supported by acquiring a license. I update with a license through Best Buy, for the software itself for the MS Access or for Word. Now with my school, the only way to be aware of Office 365 is when logged in as a faculty. Then we're using the software that they have provided and it's through a connection. It's not on the machine.

Learn a bit before you try to use it. If you are going to experience the best features of it, get to know it first. Don't just ignore it.

I would rate it a six out of ten. I use it minimally.

We use it to share work and collaborate. 

The cloud service and Skype are the most valuable features. We also use the MS Word and Excel.

Using Office 365 is not that flexible on some mobile devices, like Android.

They need to improve the security of the product. For example, I don't trust the OneDrive product on my computer.

We have five people in our office.

The technical support is okay. It is Microsoft.

It is very easy to deploy.

We have already seen ROI.

The pricing is good for all the features that we receive, e.g., Skype for Business.

It is a nice service that lets us share information easily.

Look into the security and cost of the solution before purchasing.