Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

I use Microsoft 365 Business in my company mainly for email addresses and for the packages associated with Microsoft Office.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the email addresses that my company's teams can use. The packages provided in the solution enable my company's team members to carry out their daily tasks.

The downside of Microsoft 365 Business stems from the fact that it is a bit of a pricey product. You need to move to an enterprise plan if you want the product's desktop version. A company that chooses Microsoft 365 Business needs to consider that not every employee who works from home has an internet connection.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for a year.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. Anytime I want to use the solution for other employees in my company, I just need to add additional licenses.

Around 40 people in my company use Microsoft 365 Business.

There are no plans to increase the use of Microsoft 365 Business in our company until we get a project or two that may not need to be necessarily massive.

Though I have not directly contacted the technical support team of Microsoft, I do get reports related to the interaction between my technical staff and Microsoft's support team.

I only have experience with Microsoft 365 Business.

Based on my minimal involvement in the product's installation, I think it is a straightforward process.

The solution can be deployed with stability in two weeks.

Only two people are required for the deployment and maintenance of Microsoft 365 Business.

My company did see help from the reseller of Microsoft 365 Business for the implementation process.

With Microsoft 365 Business, the prices are cheaper if you opt to pay yearly towards the licensing costs rather than monthly.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it in the future.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We are using the complete suite of the solution, including email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. It is the main communication channel for our business.

It's an exceptional product. It has more security. The product is very fast and convenient to use. Anyone can work from anywhere. There is no dependency on any of the local resources. It is a completely SaaS-based solution, so it is easy to use and manage.

The tool is slow sometimes. The performance could be improved.

I have been using the solution for three years. I am using the latest version of the solution.

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

The tool is scalable. We have ten users. We might add five more users by next year.

I do not like the support provided by the product. The response is very slow.

I have used G Suite and some third-party-hosted applications.

The setup is easy. We need to have a basic skill set to configure the solution. Everyone who has a basic understanding of technology can configure it. We must get a consultant from Microsoft to secure the environment.

The ROI is good in terms of security and scalability.

We pay a yearly license fee. The solution is very cheap. We pay AED 3,000 to AED 4,000 for licensing.

I work for a technological company. We specialize in cybersecurity. We are all engineers. I always recommend the tool to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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.

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.

Currently, we are using Microsoft 365 Business purely as a mailing solution and just for storing the data on OneDrive.

Microsoft 365 Business is a really good product. Microsoft provides many solutions like Microsoft Teams, which is useful for Team utilization across the globe, especially in this COVID 19 kind of scenario. 

If you enable the enhanced security in Microsoft Teams by using the given options, you can eliminate the third-party solutions like WhatsApp, Telegram. You can easily share your communication, which is much better. You can also collaborate. For example, instead of creating an Excel sheet on your local PC and sending it across to someone over email, you can just share it. SharePoint is one of the best tools to be implemented.

There are a lot of bugs, which I don't know how many people have come across. 

In Microsoft Teams, when you share any screen, I can't see much because the Microsoft Teams Window takes the majority of the space. A task section comes up and then below the screen, a list with the names of the people you are collaborating with comes up. When you have to share the screen, you get a small window, which also depends on the screen resolution of the person seeing it and sharing it. You basically need to have an extendable monitor and display unit to see the bigger screen. There should be a full functionality for changing the desktop screen to full screen. That would really be fantastic. This is surely going to be a critical area. If you see Zoom and Cisco WebEx, you get the full wider screen. 

In Microsoft Teams, voice quality can be made much better. I think the codex part can be something on which they can work further.

In Microsoft Outlook, the GUI is years old, which is boring and makes you want to switch to the postal way of sending emails. They must change the GUI.

I am a bit skeptical about the promises that are made by Microsoft. Even though Microsoft makes promises that your data will reside on the servers within your country. I don't think it is so, and the corporate data, the governmental data, and the patient data are still in Europe. In terms of the land laws, even if I have an agreement with Microsoft that my data should not be shared with any other countries, at the end of the day, the data is residing on some other land. So, the land laws of that particular country have the right to have access to the data that is residing on the server of a particular continent. So, the government can intercept the data. That's why I'm a bit skeptical. However, so far, no cases have come up related to this, but one day, it may come up. I hope Microsoft will find out a permanent solution for that. People are becoming more aware of privacy.

I've been using Microsoft 365 Business since 2009. 

In the initial stage of Microsoft Office 365, I was working with a major automobile company in India. We were given the opportunity to evaluate the solution completely in and out. It was a cloud-based solution, and our business or traveling users were eager to have this kind of solution. The expenditure as compared to the in-house solution was much lesser. There were many bugs at that time. Now, it's very good for one product.

Then I joined a multinational conglomerate, which was into a lot of businesses such as oil, shipping, large estates, and so on. Everything was there under one entity. We were successful in rolling out Microsoft 365 Business over there. 

In my current organization, I was given the opportunity to evaluate Microsoft 365 Business, and we started to use it.

I would say it is super. 

It is one of the best. Currently, we have around 8000 users. 

My team had contacted them, and they said that it's very good. From the support aspect, basically, you have to get a paid one. If you don't have any good enterprise agreement, it takes nearly eight to nine hours for them to come across a problem and solution. It lags in support. That's all. You have to pay a lot of money.

In my current organization, we were using an open-source free product Zimbra. Of course, an initial amount was paid for the licensing part. Because it was open-source, there were a lot of spams, and there was no protection for the email. Finally, a word was put across to my colleagues who were evaluating different products, and I said that Office 365 is the best one to go for. I was given the opportunity to evaluate, and it came into existence.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's a plug-and-play kind of scenario. It's very easy, but not as easy as Apple products.

The migration part from Zimbra took a long time, around three to four months. The deployment took around two to three weeks. 

Microsoft 365 Business will be good to have if you have a large organization where you have more than 3000 employees. Other cheaper solutions, like Gmail, are easily available in the market.

Microsoft Exchange is very good, and people are used to it. Gmail will be a big competitor for Microsoft later on when Gmail moves out of the comfort zone they are currently in. 

Gmail lags a lot as compared to Microsoft Office 365, which is very neat, clean, and easy to deploy. Any admin with one year or six months of experience can easily deploy Microsoft Office 365.

Even though this is the year of the cloud, I will suggest that instead of the cloud deployment, go for the in-house deployment.

Microsoft 365 Business is the best when your business is growing up and you want to collaborate using these tools. In my current organization, we don't explore Microsoft 365 Business much. If you see the Microsoft product portfolio, our utilization is just 10% as of now, which probably is applicable to most of the organizations. It is being used just for mailing and the ATP. Our administrators haven't enabled anything else and aren't interested. The joint collaboration is not there, and people are not looking into that aspect. 

We are just using a product like Microsoft Teams just to make calls so that the telephone bills don't increase. We use chat for easier corporate communication and so that we don't have to type emails. However, there are many further uses of Microsoft Teams. There may be some companies, which are utilizing it a bit more. These are many products that you can integrate and make use of the investments. The monthly payment, which you are making, to buy and maintain this product can be over-utilized.

Microsoft can also start promoting what can you do more with this product. Currently, they're only telling that this product is available, but they are not specifying how you can collaborate and integrate with other products.

The software companies are taking advantage of bringing AI, which can work. I promote AI, but it should be used for convenience, not for replacing or eliminating mankind.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven 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.

I  use it for Microsoft Excel, which helps with data analysis. It integrates Power BI, allowing us to perform various slicing and dicing of data.

Mostly, I have only used Microsoft 365 Business for emails and PowerPoints as of now.

The solution includes most of the things we need. We can use it to integrate other source systems as well, like Power BI.

It's helpful to even use it to build queries, like Microsoft queries. We can write SQL queries by joining two tables present in Excel itself. So, it's like having two tables in separate sheets, and we can build a query using a common column as a join condition. We can see the key dataset with common columns using the join condition. 

Moreover, we can also perform outer joins, making Microsoft 365 Business ideal for data analysis as well.

In future releases, I would like to see more integration options. 

I've been using it for the past around one year. We currently use the latest version.

It is a scalable solution. There are over 10,000 end-users in our organization. It is extensively used in our organization. We do have plans to increase the usage.

For example, I primarily use Excel in Microsoft 365 Business. So, we have options like Excel options; we have add-ins. So under the data tab, we have a data streamer, and we also have Microsoft Power Query for Excel. So using these, we can include the data-related menu bar in Excel software.

The setup is straightforward. We have Excel, and we can use it as it is. It might need an add-in to be included.

We need maintenance primarily for data analysis. We use it to analyze the data, especially when we have a large dataset that we want to segregate and analyze specifically for a particular functionality. In such cases, we can use Excel for slicing and dicing the data. It allows us to focus on a specific chunk of data to make informed decisions.

The deployment was done by our in-house team. It's a direct tool like Microsoft Excel, but there is an add-in that can be used to integrate with other source systems. It may extend the functionality.

We don't have a separate deployment process. Excel is a file that we have as part of Microsoft Office. It's a direct use, but we might need to include an add-in to display or the data-related menu in the Excel menu bar.

There would be licensing costs because Microsoft 365 Business requires a product key and a license to be present in order to use its products, including Excel and other supportive products.

I would suggest you to start using Excel as a basic step because Excel has its own formulas and functions. They can begin with lookups in Excel and then subsequently move ahead with building queries. 

If a person has only Excel to work with, they can start with that. But they would need to have Microsoft 365 Business to proceed further with other features.

Based on the Excel work that I have done using Excel, which is a part of Microsoft 365. So, for Excel, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Therefore, I would rate the solution an eight 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.