Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

I work for a contact center in Guatemala and this is a contact center platform. We use the 365 tools for our daily operations including email and back office tools. We're customers of Microsoft and I'm the telephony manager. 

Videoconferencing using teams allowed us to keep our meeting cadence during the transition to working from home. SharePoint allowed us to keep sharing content for mobile and work from home users without breaking the company security protocols.

We completed the transition to Microsoft outlook company wide Data leak prevention policy templates added the additional security required for WFH.

We have 5,000 employees and 75% are working from home. It's very stressful when you're video conferencing and you can't disable your own video feeds. I'm always having to look at myself during a conference call. One of our consultants suggested disabling our own self video feed to reduce the stress during a long conference call. It's something small but it bothered everybody.

The other issue is when you want to connect the publicly accessible telephone network to Teams, it requires a paid service and additional models and hardware. If I invite you to a Teams session, you need to have Teams installed. It requires a specific phone connection and for you to have a phone in order to dial into the conference switch. Zoom has a pool of telephone lines already included in the base service and you can just call up the conference number without needing to install anything. That's not the case with Microsoft. 

I've been using this solution for three years.

The tool works, but we have had a couple of blackouts. It was a global problem where the entire platform started behaving badly. The more you rely on the tool, the bigger the concern is for a cloud platform, but so far so good. We had a couple of issues, but that was worldwide. Of the 5,000 people in the company, probably half of them are users.  

We have three people in the company responsible for setup and the actual migration, and they deal with upkeep and any problems. We'll increase use for everybody because we're continuing to work from home and this is going to be the defacto communication tool for our working from home agents. 

We previously used Google but moved to Microsoft.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it ourselves and we paid for gold support, so we just raised a couple of questions, but it was pretty straightforward. Implementation took about one month. 

Employees are working from home and this solution has enabled us to continue functioning. 

Licensing is on an annual basis. 

It's important to take advantage of the adoption project managers at Microsoft. Our initial setup was without hiccups, but the team at Microsoft responsible for the early adoption for a successful implementation are key. They really helped with the initial setup. When you start from zero, it's not as intuitive as you might think and it helps to have people with more knowledge to point you in the right direction. It's not rocket science, but trying to do it yourself can be a nightmare. 

The product lacks features and is quite expensive so I rate this solution a nine out of 10.

This solution is used for everything, the task, and the teams. It is a collaboration of all of the applications that are found in Office 365, but with one interface in which you can communicate between people.

We have some that have been deployed on a hybrid cloud, others that are just cloud, and some that are hybrids with an Active Directory that is on-premises and connected through Windows Azure. It connects to the cloud to sync all of the users from our campus.

For email assistance, or SharePoint or for sharing drives, it is all the cloud.

One of the O365 applications that made a huge impact is the Microsoft Teams that enhanced our communication in sharing files with online modification and execution helped in focusing our conversations and divide them into channels to have an efficient and effective output. Also chatting has been evolved to be not only sharing text but also solving problems instantly due to the ease of communication (Chat, Voice, Video). Work-From-Home became much easier then you can even imagine with O365.

These are the main things that help the business collaborate.

• At the same time, you can share files, you can send emails on the spot, and you can also assign meetings on the spot.
• You can have conference calls with different parties using video and voice.

It saves a lot of time. When opening a new business, you need the main server, file sharing, and you need to secure them.

Not only to have them there on-site or on-premises, you need to have them backed up, and archived. So rather than going for a new place, with a new Internet, we go to Cloud and it will provide everything that we need.

You're not restricted to a certain place or certain country. You can work from any place on Earth, from any device, without having your laptop.

This is one of the main factors, and that it is secured. This is also a big advantage.

They have already made some improvements to the interface and dashboards that have made a positive impact.

The security sites need to be simplified and the technical support needs improvement.

In the next release, I would like to see the management of the security features become more user-friendly.

I have been using this solution for one year.

This solution is stable.

In our team, we don't have many users. We are in the early stages of migration.

Other companies that I work with have approximately three hundred or four hundred in different countries and the other sites I have one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and thirty users.

This solution is scalable.

The technical support needs time to understand your problem to help you, because of the language barrier. It takes time to solve certain things.

In the Gulf area, most people call in Arabic and want to translate to English. The problem is the Technical support does not understand English well, so it takes time to explain what the problem is when it could be a simple issue to resolve.

This doesn't represent all of the technical support, maybe 75% is good.

We have Google. Google is good, but I was not familiar with the application and the tasks because most of the time I have worked with Microsoft. They have the same features, but I didn't find that Google was easy to work with applications.

They have evolved a lot but there are still some laps between them like an on-premises exchange and Lotus Notes.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Within thirty minutes you will have your site up and running, including emails and shared folders.

Even if you need more options, like profiles and hierarchies, it is straightforward. You just go ahead and add them.

For a new business with twenty people, you will need approximately two or three days maximum to have all the sites up and running for all services.

I did the implementation myself. I did not use any vendors or integrators.

The return on investment is very high for companies whose work is based on communications.

This is targeted for countries with unstable internet. As an example, in our region you don't know when the internet will go off, we have now been without the internet for over a week. This is a problem for people who have on-premises deployments and need to connect to the internet.

For new businesses, rather than having a lot of servers, they can go online. Most people have 4G on the mobiles so they can just search it on their mobile. The Internet is not an issue.

After the last update that was made, you are not obliged to take the same license for all of your users. For example, if you go for E1 it is $12 USD per month for every person.

Now you can select different licenses, for example, if somebody doesn't need all of the features, it would cost $8 USD per month and if they didn't need the email application then it would cost $6 USD per month.

This solution requires a lot of money. It's a huge expense and it's a concurrent expense. You don't just pay it once, it's going to be continuous and you pay annually.

Unless there is a huge impact on the business, then it would be worth going for it. If there is no impact on the business then you can use it on-premises and work with the old office.

I would recommend this solution for newly opening businesses that need collaboration and communication that requires the internet but doesn't need a fixed place to work. They should go with Office 365.

They are going to pay every year but they will be saving a lot of money for electricity and maintenance for the telephone, voice, VOIP, IP telephones, internet, and subscriptions.

The security is also important, it's not exposed to everybody. 

You won't need an IT department because one person can handle everything.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

We use the program for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc.

Stability-wise, the program could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for five years. I am using the latest version.

I rate the software’s stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes, I have to restart the PC.

Microsoft 365’s scalability depends on the subscription plans. It might cost around R300 per month.

The initial setup is straightforward. Its installation part is easy and takes around 40 minutes to complete. If you use Microsoft Office 2016, deinstall it entirely before installing the software. It is essential to have backups of its previous versions on your system.

The program is inexpensive. The license allows five users to access it at the same time.

It is an excellent and powerful program. Customers are upgrading the old Microsoft Office packages to 365 as it is the future. I rate it a ten out of ten.

We are cloud service providers for Microsoft. We offer it as a service to our customers and we are heavy users of Microsoft products.

We use this solution in our office for email and communication through SharePoint and Teams. We maximize the use of the forms that are also included in Office 365.

As the head of our technology solutions group, I use it also for tracking, and surveys within the team. I share the forms with the team and I am able to receive responses from the team. 

I had used Excel and Word for many years even before I started using this solution.

In the past, offices had to install their own Exchange, but with Office 365 we can enjoy the email that is bundled with it, which is Outlook. 

I enjoy using Teams, Outlook, the forms that are provided, and SharePoint because it connects all of us within the team.

We are able to share all of our worksheets, and the collaboration is valuable. This is what makes the Teams feature the part I enjoy the most in this solution.

The storage, cloud storage, and forms are very useful.

There is a lot of documentation available that is easy to comprehend and follow.

I have yet to explore all of what this solution offers. At this time, my focus is on learning more about Teams, especially the forms and the collaboration.

The area that consumes a lot of my time is auditing. I am responsible for handling the licenses and was not happy with the amount of time spent during the auditing process.

There is always room for improvement.

I started with this company three years ago and that is when I started using Microsoft 365 Business.

Microsoft 365 Business is a stable product.

I have not yet experienced expanding this solution. It provides me with enough resources and enough service. For now, scalability is not something that I am concerned with.

We have not contacted the technical support of Microsoft. We have our own technical support team who can support us.

The last time that I had an issue, it was easily resolved by our team. They were able to resolve it easily.

We also provide Hyper-V. We offer the operating system of Microsoft and bundle it when we offer servers for our customers.

I use solutions other than Microsoft 365 Business. I also use SQL, the Windows Server Operating System, and the CALs. I find that CALs is a bit more complicated but because there is a lot of support available, I am able to figure it out. When I ask for clarification and the correct sizing, they provide me with that.

More of us should be more aware of the usage of CALs and how it really works with the operating system.

I was not involved in the initial setup as we have an in-house IT team who is responsible for the installation.

I find the pricing of Microsoft 365 Business to be reasonable. With the other products such as SQL database, they are expensive.

There is a free license with Microsoft, which is the SQL Express. But it would be better if they could improve, or make adjustments to have higher limitations.

The Express is limited based on the capacity of the memory and processor. If my requirements go beyond those limitations then I have to go to the standard edition, which is very expensive.

I would like to see adjustments made to the limitations in SQL Express. It would be very helpful.

I am really very happy using this solution. I am comfortable using it and have asked my team to offer this solution and I have included it as a part of our portfolio.

I encourage my team to offer this solution to some of our customers who are not yet with Office 365.

We have our own management portal and we are partners with Microsoft.

I would definitely recommend this solution to anyone who is not yet using it.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business 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.

As a business intelligence specialist and business owner, I primarily use the standard apps in this solution. I enjoy the fact that there's a smorgasbord of additional apps that make for great productivity within the business - especially when you realize what all the apps can do for your business.

MS365 Business has offered me a robust infrastructure with the out of the box standard offering but also provided amazing apps and features to encourage growth in other areas of my business.

I like that the standard solution is easy and intuitive. It's worth taking the time to go and poke around all the other apps, though. 

There are rules of engagement that are important to know and it can be overwhelming at first if you're never been a Sysadmin. The Apps within the solution provide different business functions so you don't have to hire anyone - you can actually do most of it yourself. It's a huge cost saving for a small business and with the subscription, it's actually much cheaper than buying the products outright, as you would have had to do in the past. You can get everything you need for a reasonable price e.g. if you wanted, say, five features/ functionality you'd pay between $100 and $1000 for each, potentially spending close to $5000 once off but then next year arrives and you need to buy the next version and again you're spending precious funds. Instead, with subscription plans, you get between ~20 features/ functions. My plan, plus the add-on Apps costs my business $12.50x2 + $30 +$9.99  per month = $780 annually - the key is TODAY'S cash stays in my pocket.

You have to buy licenses for everything, but the pricing structure is very competitive. From a small business perspective, there's lots of advantages to going with 365, because not only are you getting the standard tool set to actually just run a standard business, but you're getting add-on Apps/features that open up opportunities that you might not have thought of and... the realization that you don't have to pay another entity because you can do it yourself e.g. sway and bookings

I think where Microsoft could help with the product is to perhaps have an agent/ comprehensive start up video, that can assist with the initial setup since you're now dealing with several admin panels. You can learn it yourself but there are certain tips and tricks that could much more easily be communicated in a conversation. For example, know that if you go into an admin portal, you're going to need five things; and you need those five things before you go into the portal and they each may need their own setup/initiation.

I submitted a good few support tickets early on because some of it was a bit overwhelming. When you're a small business and you suddenly realize that there are various admin portals which all do different things and you set something up in this portal and then you have to go set something up in another portal and connect the dots. If you don't know to do that and you haven't yet read ALL the documentation, it can be very overwhelming and you can feel a little lost. But once you get your head around it all, it's quite brilliant - the architecture and how they set everything up in the background.

I've been using the MS365 Business standard plan for two months. 

The stability of this solution is superb. No issues. Just know that when you make updates or edits in the admin panels, the change(s) may not take effect instantaneously, in some cases.

I haven't tested scalability as we are a new business, just starting out. There is only one other person working with me and I purchased two licenses even though the other person in the company doesn't yet use the product. You have to have one license per user even though each user gets to load it/ use the license on several other devices. It might be a waste but I wanted to do the right thing. It would be helpful if they provided an option for two licenses so you could legitimately have it on a second computer. 

I've bought additional licenses for other apps because my business is going to be delivering a very comprehensive business intelligence/ project management service offering. I expect to expand use and embark on several upgrade routes available to me, when the time is right.

Very responsive, thorough and professional. Just be aware that they have teams with specialities and they don't cross lines e.g. I needed help with Power BI so you have to specify that in your ticket or deal with a generalist who will not be able to help you. I learned to state the product first then state your issue.

I've used Google in business as well, and I like the ability of being able to collaborate that they offer, but Microsoft 365 actually fixed that and you are now able to collaborate in the documents e.g. Word and Excel. So I really didn't see the need to stick with Google. The only thing that Microsoft wasn't able to deliver for me was photo and video organization/editing. Even if you're not a photographic business, you do still take photos and videos for your business. I do still use Google for all my photos and images.

The intial setup was very straightforward and took me less than an hour but all the administrative elements can take longer, depending on what you choose to do. You need to configure it with all it's variables and that can take extra time. The basic setup to just start work, was super quick. If you have a powerful computer it's about the download time and then some setup time. It's the Sysadmin leg of work that was a steep learning curve for me.

Handled it by myself with great support from a very responsive MS365 Tech team.

incredible. Very lower startup cost.

For the standard plan, the cost is USD $12.50 per month, committed annually. There are often discounts offered versus month to month.

I wanted to stick with the best and only evaluated all the different price plan options. For my size and stage of business the standard option offered everything I needed, plus some.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We use Microsoft 365 Business because it can integrate. If I work in Microsoft PowerPoint, Word, or Excel, my team can also open the same files without any issues.

I would recommend Microsoft 365 Business to new users because it has user-friendly features for beginners.

The solution’s cost could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for more than five years.

The solution's stability and performance are better when it runs on a MacBook than on a Windows laptop.

Microsoft 365 Business is not a scalable solution. If you want to increase your storage, there is an additional cost, which is expensive.

More than 10,000 users are using Microsoft 365 Business in our organization globally.

Installing Microsoft 365 Business on the server is moderately complex, but installing it on your personal laptop or PC is easy.

We use the cloud version of Microsoft 365 Business.

Overall, I rate Microsoft 365 Business an eight out of ten.