It seems like every other week when we log into the administrative portals, it doesn't matter which one, it could be the active directory portal, it could be the exchange admin center or SharePoint admin center, it seems like Microsoft is consistently updating with new versions of the admin centers, which can be frustrating.

This is due to the fact that, if you haven't been on in a while, sometimes it takes a good hour or two to reorient yourself -especially when you're trying to find a setting. We went through an assessment about four months ago and I had the hardest time finding certain settings in my baselines. Just being able to demonstrate something as simple as an audit log, when they move things around, can be challenging. It seems like at least once or twice a month. It gets a little confusing.

On the endpoint protection side, they've done a merge with both our security center and their compliance center. You can do multiple things from doing the same thing, however, for multiple admin sites. You get used to like one and then it takes you to another. It gets a little cumbersome or confusing as the outlays are different, the menus are a little bit different. That's one of my biggest gripes about it.

Sometimes, if we have a user that is doing some work from home, for example, and they're not on their corporate laptop and they're on their regular laptop, or vice versa, and they have like a personal Office 365 license, they sometimes conflict with each other, which then puts the person into an authentication loop, which basically means they can't access their stuff properly. We're running into that problem, actually, with one of our users right now.

For some reason, there were three different Office products that were loaded on there. A regular Office 365, Office 365 Business, and then Office 365 Enterprise. How all three of them got on there, we're not quite sure. He can open up some of his documents normally that are stored on his machine from the OneDrive, yet, when they try to open up documents that are in SharePoint, every now and then, depending on the updates that are pushed out by Microsoft, they can't open up the documents. At that point, you kind of like have to uninstall or do an online repair of the Microsoft Office itself, and then re-install it.

Due to this issue, you're losing productivity time. This guy just happens to be our corporate recruiter. We're losing time with him being able to look at resumes and stuff like that, or look at qualifications or statements of work and stuff like that.

We've been working for about two hours and yeah, I mean, he can download the document and open it up, but he can't actually open it up while it's in SharePoint. When you don't have that, when you lose that capability, especially like when they're working on proposals and when time is of the essence, it can become a big issue. 

Sometimes when the software pushes security patches it breaks, Windows wide.

Based on my experience and the tasks that I handle, for my customers, I didn't notice that there is any need for improvement.

It would be a fantastic opportunity if their solution could be used in combination with VoIP software, allowing you to combine VoIP software and Office 365 on a single platform.

Office 365 could allow for smoother collaboration with other companies, which is the main reason we use it. The B2B connection is something we need, like global adverse lists between two tenants or multiple users. That's what we're missing at the moment.

The price is getting more and more expensive. They increased the price recently.

We are thinking about the way we are using our ERP and our CRM. The integration with ERP is not so good, but mainly due to the ERP, not due to Office. For integration with CRM, we are using Pipedrive.

The phone systems are expensive at the moment. The integration with mobile services is not so good. It's coming, but they could improve a lot.

Sometimes the configurations of the error troubleshooting are pretty problematic and there are a lot of issues that happen even if you follow the step-by-step guides. They can work on fixing this issue. If there are a lot of issues in your Windows or your Office or anything, you restart your PC and it works. They need to get rid of this need.

While using Microsoft OneDrive, which is part of Office 365, we use it to store all our data files. At this point in time, OneDrive doesn't support PST files. PST files are for our Outlook data. OneDrive doesn't take backup of the PST files, which is a big setback.

In the future release, there should be better automation. When you're scheduling a meeting, it should be in an automated way, it should prove us with more information about kind room slots. If there is a travel booking that is coming onto your email, it should go ahead and block your calendar as well in accordance with the times. This is an Outlook-related suggestion. 

On PowerPoint, there could be more templates that could be added in, which makes your job slightly easier when you're designing something. 

Excel, I think is a phenomenal solution, the only problem is it becomes very heavy as data increases. If they can work towards compression, that should be helpful.

I would like to see the macro functionality in Excel made simpler. 

Excel should be made more intelligent in terms of being able to figure out data types. For example, it should understand that if I have 16,000 records, it should know the datatype of each of the columns. There might be numbers, dates, and other types of data, and it should be able to recognize these based on context. If this were the case then it would make things easier for me.

I would like to see Azure artificial intelligence available in Office 365 so that it is available to everyone.

Performance-wise, Office 365 needs a lot of bandwidth. The problem is, the solution requires very high bandwidth and internet usage. Meaning, the desktop application consumes a lot of internet data. Sometimes, when the connection is slow, it won't work and it won't load. This is an area for improvement for Office 365.

In the next release, I would like for Office 365 to be more of a finished product. It should have the ability to place calls and do system messaging. Those would be good improvements.

I would also like for the license to include a video cloning feature.

I'm working with logistics a lot, and I'm seeing that the Business Center is not so good because I've been working in IT since 1984, so I have some experience in logistic systems. Three years ago, I had a project with a big client here in Portugal and I started using Microsoft Navision, which is the old version of Microsoft ERP. Now we are changing to Business Center, but it's not very good.

I think Office 365 is a good ERP for services but not so good for businesses, for industries, or for logistic systems. Those areas could be improved.

I'm not happy with how Microsoft Office 365 works. Normally, they have a way to work with specific developments, and I think they shouldn't allow the partners to make some changes they have made. When I have a client with a lot of changes, we have a problem with that because there aren't rules to develop inside the ERP, so you can do anything. I think that's not a good point.

I think SAP is very well prepared for that compared to Microsoft because it has the rules that departments have to follow. So, there should be more rules regarding restrictions for partners.

Procurement could also be improved.

Data protection and email security are almost the same for all the organizations, irrespective of their segment (SMB or enterprises), with standard subscription at least basic Data loss prevention and Advance threat protection can be enabled for SMB segments, it is available in enterprise version / Premium versions. For basic business subscriptions, Microsoft can think of providing PC and mobile management features to enable good security for data in different devices (It comes with additional cost). Overall Microsoft can think of providing DLP and ATP (at least some basic) options to Small and Medium organizations (Its already available for premium and enterprise customers).

We find that there is an abundance of features. Nothing is missing for us right now. 

We have found that, with Teams, if you are including one more person who is not in the company ecosystem, supposedly I'm inviting them as a guest in the chat. However, when I do that, I can't share files.

As a private user, I do not appreciate the cloud features, but I doubt that this is something Microsoft would consider a feature request.

Improvements can be made to the products generic offering. It's not customized for health care. It doesn't understand the meaning of health care related concepts. Providing a greater degree of industry specificity would make the tool much more unique and valuable.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface in the next release. We worked with a developer to upgrade the settings and optimize the base functionality. If the UI was more intuitive, all the user would need to do is click through.

They are a little bit behind Microsoft Word in regards to the ability it has. It has many things you can add, and they keep adding tables, diagrams, and everything in other places. However, Microsoft Word is a little bit left behind regarding the tools it has.

I'm not really sure whether this is possible, but maybe some sort of PDF editing. I also think that it could be more user-friendly for not-so-experienced people.

I don't see any areas of improvement right now in terms of features. That said, I'd like to see them add more features in the future in order to continue to advance the product.

In general, the desktop apps could be a little leaner and open faster in less powerful machines. 

The interface for Outlook could use a refresh, to make it more like the other software in the suite.

Integration between Outlook calendar and Google Calendar would be a good improvement since many of our team use Android phones and personal Gmail accounts as their main calendar application.

Many of the compliance facilities, whilst available, require a bit of 'digging' around the back end of the admin/security facilities. It would be nice to have industry/regional templates which could be adopted and customized to help get compliance settings made more easily, especially for user organizations that face a lot of compliance issues.

There's a matter of sharing with other users. If someone is working on it or disconnects from the mutual storage, I need to save it as is and I need to override it. I cannot work together with other users on the same document. That may be possible on the cloud version of Office 365, however, I'm not sure as we use the desktop version. This is one issue we have with the solution.

If two people update the same file, it causes issues.

Office 365 could be easier to use at first. Tutorials are needed to know how to use the solution.

• They should reduce the license fees....otherwise its the best office solution till date from the Microsoft.

Skype for Business could use some help. But, they constantly update and improve the full suite of apps.

The UI/UX feels a bit clunky. Especially compared to consumer Skype or Teams. There isn’t persistent chat, so it is hard to having on-going conversations. We actually stopped using it for instant messaging, but still use it for the CloudPBX/PSTN (landline calling) which works pretty well. There are some stability issues, but better than a lot of VoIP options.

Integration with other platforms can be improved. As it is now, it works really well with Azure and other products from Microsoft. However, if you want to integrate something outside of this, especially with Excel, it gives us challenges. There are a lot of use cases in Excel where we want to integrate with other services.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could use some customization, but it's trivial.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

They should stop releasing new features and focus on making the existing ones work. Their support is so terrible and unusable except during dire emergencies.

Be sure you understand ADFS and, if you decide to go with it, what you get and don't get with it. Your users will want it.

ADFS was sold to overcome the issues with entering passwords in all your clients (Outlook, Skype for Business, OneDrive) but, if your password changes, you do have to manually update passwords in all of these clients.

Also, this does not get you direct access to the 365 portal or SharePoint without modifying links to use Federated Services.

This becomes an issue if you use generic accounts for the shop. It will work if each of your users are required to use their own ID. Also, note there is a cost for the Azure instance of ADFS (servers, compute, network, VPN).

The security should be improved.

There are several areas that this service can be improved. The email, there are certain features we would like to see improvements from Microsoft, and also there are applications called BlueJeans, and there are certain things.

There are several additional features we would like to see, such as advanced features of SAN protection in Office 365. The main thing is the SAN protection; we would like to see a lot of advanced features added because we had a lot of spam attacks.

The feature to convert PDF file to a Word document needs improvement as well as the feature to save the file automatically when typing, without using the save command. 

I'm not sure if there are areas of improvement. For us, it's working quite well.

Using Visual Basic, I have had a lot of trouble with relative paths when programming for Excel, and sometimes it is very difficult to debug programs. For example, if the user has their focus on a different sheet, one that you do not expect, then the program begins to behave unexpectedly. This means that you cannot use relative paths, and you have to use absolute paths. Microsoft could issue warnings if you are programming in a way that might have side effects.

There is a problem with the Microsoft Office documentation in terms of undocumented features. When you are programming and there is an undocumented and unexpected behavior in the background, it can be very painful to find the bugs.

In terms of improvement, a better help bar would be good. I find it's generally not very helpful and I have to search online.

• Yammer
• RMS
• Delve

I started working a lot on Microsoft Teams and I find it a bit vast. It should be divided out a bit so that someone can use it for basic functionality, like audio, video, and calls. Then, if someone wants more advanced functionality for file sharing and team creation, and so on, they could use a separate app. I would prefer it as separate options (advanced vs basic). Currently, it is all bundled in one big product and it's confusing.

• It needs improvements around its compatibility with non-Microsoft products.
• They should do more testing before product releases.

We have had some connectivity issues.

Teams could be better. It is not very well integrated with the rest of the solution. It's too heavy.

I would like to see better integration with Teams, and better usability with SharePoint. It's complicated.

The Skype for Business admin centre could be easier to use.

The Microsoft Intune admin portal still needs some compatibility support to run on all browsers. Presently, it requires IE 11.0 and higher version to work properly.

The default reporting is not very helpful; extendable mostly through PowerShell; must have knowledge of PowerShell to fully utilize.

Sometimes the synchronization between the desktop and online is a little bit slow.

Office 365 would be improved if the CRM integration were better.

Teams still has some shortcomings, however, new features and fixes being rapidly released. Security is still complex, but the admin console improving. 

The ability to work with SharePoint from within the Office applications is limited. (There is still a need for third party tools like Harmon.ie).

I would like to see improvements in connections to external content types and their connectors.

While consulting at a client’s office, I found it very difficult to connect SharePoint designer external content types to the IBM AS400 iSeries connector. I was also trying to connect to the JDE connector.

Microsoft Excel for Mac (version 15.30) is very slow with a large Excel document. Microsoft Excel for Windows is much faster on the same Mac with Windows (Boot Camp). I’d like to see an improvement in the speed of Excel for Mac in relation to Windows.

• Performance
• Scalability