Office 365 Reviews

• Cloud
• Collaboration ability
• Security.

We are a remote/distributed company, so we need cloud functionality; collaboration is also key in a remote environment.

We have greater ability to communicate and work on projects much more efficiently. I can provide IT support for over 200 employees remotely.

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.

I have used it for 1.5 years.

Rarely have we had stability issues. Maybe 20 minutes of disruption over 1.5 years.

Office 365 scales extremely well.

I have only had to use their support once, but they seemed proficient.

We didn’t really have a previous solution. We used a stand-alone email service and older versions of Office.

It is a very easy, logical set-up and now they have an on-boarding wizard which looks helpful and offer FastTrack to help with on-boarding.

Licensing is maybe the most confusing part of it – in fact there are certification courses just for licensing! But, we have had both the E3 and E5 levels and provides everything we need.

We looked at Google at Work.

Provide lots of training and roll out one app at a time for apps that are above and beyond standard Office apps. Reiterate that they can use cloud/desktop or both. Our users sometimes struggle understanding that the desktop apps have the same content as the cloud version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution since 2013.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it to share work and collaborate. 

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

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

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

We have five people in our office.

The technical support is okay. It is Microsoft.

It is very easy to deploy.

We have already seen ROI.

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

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

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

It gives a platform to connect with your colleagues. Through Yammer, its cloud connectivity enhances its MS Office experience.

By employing cloud integration, its performance has increased. It has got an upgraded version of MS Word, and a better and upgraded PowerPoint, which are very useful.

Its cloud connectivity and integration of Yammer is best. It's a complete package for any office to use.

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

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

Here are some of the valuable features:

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using this solution for seven months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have a global solution, you can go from one product to the other very easily. And then you can share data between all the different Office tools which is good because participation and sharing is very good. That's the most important aspect of Office 365.

I have been using Office 365 for four years. 

We don't have any problems with scalability. We have around 150 users. 

We have an internal IT support team. So we send any problem to IT support and they contact Microsoft if needed. 

I'm not the one doing the setup, so I don't know exactly how long it takes and if it was difficult, but I think it went quickly.

I would recommend it because it's rather user friendly and we don't have any particular problems. I would recommend it to a company without a problem.

A need that a company like ours has is that we want to be able to have data flow into one tool, for example, for all the management of tasks through the company and workflow of who is doing what and so on. There are no real solutions for this at the moment in Office 365. It would be nice if they could implement this in the next release, so we can have one solution from one company giving us the whole data and flow of data into the company.

I would rate Office 365 an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for email exchange.

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.

It's very stable.

The scalability is good. More than 700 people are using this solution. Their job titles range from IT manager, network engineer, to corporate team members, there are several staff engineers, everyone.

We have about three people who are directly working with deployment and maintenance.

We were using open source email server entourage exchange, and from there the best option was to migrate to Office 365.

The initial setup was a bit complex because we were migrating to exchange service. 

Deployment took around three weeks to fully migrate everything to Office 365.

We used official applications provided by Microsoft for the migration. There were no other articles used.

Technical support of Office 365 is good.

We are using a particular type of license which allows each item to be priced around 30 dollars per month. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

The advice I would give depends mainly on their requirements. If they need to minimize their administration, Office 365 would be an excellent option.

On a scale of one to ten, one being the lowest and ten being the highest, I would rate this product a seven.