Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

We primarily use the solution for email, collaboration, some business applications like Sharepoint, and the Exchange server.

For example, we have depended heavily on it for our remote work capability, we have worked 100% remotely since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

The email on offer is very nice. It's very easy to use. We've enjoyed that aspect so far. It's very clearly laid out.

We can easily collaborate between users with. We can share and work on documents, for example. 

The solution has the capabilities to help me organize my week.

The product is very proactive. They know there are issues before we report them and they alert us to the fact that they are working to fix things.

For the most part, the solution is very user-friendly.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward.

Microsoft is having some issues now and therefore it may not be the best time to evaluate them. However, they acknowledge that they have the issues. They are working to fix things.

The stability is a real issue right now. It's something that they need to fix.

It's a bit complex in itself when you get into items such as security or compliance. That said, if you're knowledgeable it's no trouble. We are excited to see the end result after the various roll outs that MS is currently carrying on.

I've been using the solution for years. It's been a long time. I have quite a bit of experience with the product.

The stability is not so good. It's an aspect of the solution we really don't like. They need to work on this. There is some stability, however, there are some issues with integrations. I am assuming that these recent stability issues stem from the various rollouts and integration activities that MS is carrying out to better improve the solution.

The solution scales easily. If you want to add people, you simply add them. However, that means you need to buy more licenses, so your cost will go up.

Support can be a bit better, however, they are quite good at being proactive. Usually, they know there is a problem before we do, and by the time we reach out they are working on a fix of some sort.

Some of their support is AI as well, which means that over time, as it learns, it will get better and more effective. Basically, it needs to be a bit more robust. It needs to be more flexible in terms of understanding what you're looking for. That will likely come /improve with time.

We did use Outlook and Exchange, however, the ease of managing a SaaS versus on-prem meant it was more scalable and it's easy to manage. We didn't have to bother with any back-end integration.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It was straightforward for our team. Basically, you log in online and download the software and everything is basically automatically set up so it's easy. You don't have to worry about complexities.

The deployment just takes a few minutes. It's very fast and easy. Of course, the download time depends on the speed of your internet.

We handled the process ourselves. We did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. It was all done in-house.

A bit of a tough one to calculate for MS365 but I would say that it is positive, very positive.

The licensing is flexible. You can pay yearly or monthly. It's up to you.

The overall cost is relative. There aren't a lot of other mainstream options, except for maybe Google Email.

Google Apps

We are using the latest version of the solution at this point. I cannot recall the exact version number, however. It may be the 2019 release.

Currently, we have about 30 people on our team.

We do plan to continue to use the solution going forward. We have no plans to change to something else.

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations. I would rate it at an 8 out of 10. The collaboration capabilities we have now are amazing. We really appreciate what it empowers us to achieve.

We use it for normal office applications.

Its interface looks clean, and its performance seems quite fast. It is faster than our previous app.

Its price could be better for companies that are not using it massively.

We started to use it around last year. 

It is stable.

I don't know if it is scalable or not. In terms of users, we are in the transition process to upgrade to this solution. Currently, not all users are using it. If it is given to our whole staff, we would have 30,000 users. We plan to keep using this solution and expand its usage.

We have our own technical team, and we contact them for any issues. If they need further help with a specific issue, they contact Microsoft support.

We have been using only Microsoft products. We were earlier using the other version of Office.

It was done by our technical team. We don't need a team to manage this. We just need to manage the license and contract. We have a small team that does the license and contract management.

We have an enterprise license, and we get some price off for that. Its price could be better for companies that are not using it massively.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten.

Students use it mostly for sending emails, storing their documents, and collaborating.

Office products such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are strong points of this solution.

Microsoft Teams can be improved. It is a bit taxing on resources and is resource-heavy on the devices. When you install it on a PC, it uses a lot of memory.

They should look for a better price model for educational institutions, and it should be free. We are also using Google Suite, which is free for educational institutions. They charge business people, not nonprofit institutions.

I have been using this solution for some time.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have around 2,000 users, and we want to increase the usage.

We get support from Microsoft through their local dealers. Their support is fine.

We are also using Google Suite. Microsoft 365 has a price attached, whereas Google Suite is free for educational institutions. Microsoft 365 has got popular applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, whereas Google Suite has got similar products that do the same thing, but they are not very popular.

It was straightforward.

I installed it myself.

They are always a bit pricey. They should reduce their prices or make it free because we already have other solutions, like Google Suite, which are cheaper or free.

If you can afford it, then go for it. It is a good product.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a six 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.

I am not a technical person, I am from the sales side and more on the commercial side of things. Our company is in Mozambique and we are the main Dell EMC repair center and service provider.  

My main use case for Office 365 is really to type documents with Word, to prepare presentations with the PowerPoint, and also to do spreadsheets with Excel. The product in the suite that I use the most is Word. PowerPoint and Excel to a somewhat lesser extent. But I do use all three frequently.  

We also resell the product so we do deployments for our customers as well.  

With Office, the interface is now more user-friendly than the previous versions of Microsoft Office. The functionality and ability to work offline are also great. There are more helpful tools in the interfacer now. For example, if you are working with Excel and you are typing a formula, Office 365 gives you tips as you work if you do something wrong. It will identify what is wrong and then you can apply the corrections. Things like that make the product more intuitive and helpful. The previous version did not have that kind of help to this extent. So, the most valuable features are the ability to work offline, the ability to have tips when writing formulas, and the improved more user-friendly interface.  

I believe one thing I enjoy more about the experience of using the product is that it now the basic features that I use most frequently are easier to find, access, and manage. This helps to make my work easier and speed up productivity.  

Microsoft could still work on the bandwidth used with Office 365. It does not seem to behave the same depending on the networks that I am working on. Sometimes I can tell the program uses more or less bandwidth and actually measure the difference. I believe that this can be enhanced to be independent of the network that I am working on. The bandwidth consumption should always be about the same.  

Some features of specific products could be more user-friendly. For instance, in Excel, some functionalities like the Pivot tables are not always so easy to use. Right now if you want to create a new formula, you need to have some knowledge about programming in Visual Basic. It does not seem to me that this should be a requirement. So you can type a command and then set up a new formula that is not listed on standard functions supplied with Excel. For users who do not understand the basics of programming and VBA, that really becomes an impossible mission. They may know that they can create a formula and what they might want it to do but they do not know how to do it. So if they do not find the formula in what is provided, then they really have to forget using Excel for that type of solution. If they knew how to do the programming they can do virtually anything through Excel, but they need to have the ability to do the programming and develop the formula. It does not really have to be that way. Microsoft could expand those capabilities.  

One final issue we have has to do with the backups. Microsoft does not assure the backups of the information that you store at their data centers. So besides deploying Office 365 as a solution, you also need a backup solution specifically for Office 365 on the cloud. We definitely recommend Office 365, but unfortunately in our country — specifically for the public companies — it is not easy to sell because we have some strict policies and regulations regarding data. Public companies cannot store information outside of the country. So, since Microsoft Office 365 is a Cloud product some public companies can not go for that option. They still have to work with previous versions of the product. Private sector companies do not have this type of restriction. We can only recommend the product when interested customers can do it within the proper guidelines.  

I have been using Office 365 for about one year now.  

Office 365 is a stable product. Besides the issues with the bandwidth use where sometimes the product uses more bandwidth depending on the network, it performs well and it is very stable and very reliable.  

We have done sales and installations for SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) as well as for enterprise companies. The issues with scalability would be budget and Internet bandwidth. If the money is there it is not an issue.  

My technicians deal with Microsoft support if they have to. Mostly they will take care of issues themselves. They have a dedicated contact and a direct portal for support purposes. So that is great. If a technician needs to open a ticket for a customer, the technician can open himself and go straight to the support portal to log the tickets and carry on from there. In terms of response time, I am not exactly sure because I am not directly involved.  

Previously, I was using Microsoft on a version from 2016. So it really is not a complete switch of products as it is still the Microsoft solution. It is just a newer version.  

I do not think the installation was easy but that is because we have around a hundred users. I did not manage the installation, but I heard from the technical guys that it is generally easier than the previous versions. We signed an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. With that, we got the keys and we got the centralized management panel from where we deploy the Office on all the endpoints. So this made it easier. For the previous versions, the technical guy had to go to each user machine to make the installation through a compact disc. But with volume licensing installation is centralized and the IT manager deployed remotely to the endpoints.  

We handle the setup and the deployment in house. We have a separate team with more-or-less 30 technicians. Some of them are specifically certified on Microsoft products through the partnership that we have with Microsoft. So, depending on the infrastructure that our customer has, we can send out as many as three technicians if it is to be deployed for say 200 users. When we need to do a mailbox migration, most of them have to be migrated at the same time. In that case, we allocate two to three technicians to do it as quickly as possible. If we are talking about enterprise companies with 1000 users — depending on what the customer requires in terms of delivery time — we might allocate as many as 20 guys. It is more likely we will allocate 10 guys. It basically depends on the customer's requirements.  

The pricing for the product is a bit of a tricky question. In terms of the total cost of ownership, I can say that it is expensive. It is a fair price, but in our country or another country with economies similar to  Mozambique, the pricing structure may be a little high and prohibitive. The first issue is the volatility of the exchange rate because our currency, the Metical, is very volatile related to the dollar. The problem here is the customer has an agreement and when he realized that he wants to add some other applications or services or something else, he has the expectation of price based on what he signed on the first agreement. But when he sees the new price, it could become a lot higher than expected because of the exchange rate. It would be nice if somehow Microsoft had some flexibility with the initial agreement so that pricing would not fluctuate dramatically because of the exchange rate.  

Another thing that factors into the pricing is that the Internet connection and Internet bandwidth is still very expensive here in Mozambique. So it is not always an easy decision to make the migration to Office 365 due to these two variables.  

I recommend the Microsoft Office 365 product to clients. We are able to do proofs-of-concept with clients who are interested and carry forward from there.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Office 365 as eight-and-a-half.  

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 for email and desktop management. We also use Office Suite products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to manage documents. 

I don't like the tool's administration which consists of crappy operations. 

I have been using the solution for three to four years. 

Microsoft 365 Business is stable. 

The product is scalable and my company has 300 users for the tool. 

We escalated a few issues and did not get a response from Microsoft's support. The support is too complex and takes a lot of time. It is not quick. 

The product is expensive and the licensing costs are yearly. 

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten. I will recommend the tool for corporate email and document management. 

Microsoft 365 Business's most important feature is mobility. I have the application on my system and many other devices.

The program's UI could be faster. Additionally, more customization and cheaper pricing would be good.

I have used the latest version of Microsoft 365 Business for over three years.

I rate the stability of the program a nine out of ten.

I rate the scalability of the program an eight out of ten. There are approximately 100 users in our organization.

Previously, we used Google Workspace but switched to Microsoft 365 Business because our users were more comfortable with the program.

The initial setup was straightforward. I rate the process a ten out of ten. It is deployed on-premises and on the cloud in our organization. The deployment process took around three months. We required two people for the implementation.

I rate the pricing of the program a seven out of ten.

I rate Microsoft 365 Business an eight out of ten.

You can use Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Access, which is a database.

You can make frequent presentations to customers, and create invoices.

Excel is a very powerful tool. I can create a lot of data in Microsoft Excel and then use it and extract the data in any analytics platform.

It is a complete tool. It gives me every kind of feature that I want. It's quite good.

When you talk about ease of use, it's relative. I have been using Microsoft products for a long time. I have grown with it and the product has grown with me. I feel comfortable. But, for someone with no background in IT that doesn't have the dexterity to play with the IT tools, they may find it difficult to use.

When you get used to it, it's like picking up a paper and a pen and drafting it. You can use many more features. Paper and pen are used to exemplify simplicity.

When using PowerPoint, I want to create a very illustrative presentation. I can draw many pictures globally with several designs. It's flexible. After preparing the presentation, I can preview the form and share it with people.

It's very user-friendly.

I can use this product on five devices. I can use it on my mobile, and I have two laptops. I can access it from any one of my devices, even if I am commuting or in another country, I can access all of my documents.

Microsoft OneNote is also included. I can create my shopping list, or go on a trip, and make all of my notes accessible on all devices.

With such a complete tool, it may be difficult for a beginner to use without help.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for between four and five years.

It is a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. Most people in our organization use it.

We have approximately 50 users, maybe more.

With all Microsoft products, online help is available.

I have not had the need to contact technical support. I have not had any issues.

Positive

The initial setup was nothing at all. It was no effort.

It was very easy and very comfortable to complete.

Microsoft 365 has multiple packages. I use the auxiliary version. We can deploy all of them in 10 to 15 minutes maximum, but it depends on the internet speed as well.

I completed the deployment and implementation myself. It doesn't require any help.

It could be a little less expensive.

You have the option of 1TB of storage per user, or you can keep it on your desktop or laptop.

I can create documents in Microsoft Office and fill them in PDF. I use Adobe quite extensively. Between them, I don't need anything.

There is no other alternative, except maybe Google.

Overall, I am very satisfied with this product and I recommend it to others.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

An area for improvement would be for Outlook to sync with Google Calendar.

I've been using Microsoft 365 for five years.

This product is reliable.

It is possible to scale up this solution.

I would rate this product eight out of ten.