What needs improvement with Microsoft 365 Business?

Sometimes, the migration from old software to new software isn't very smooth. Upgrading from the old version to the new version of Microsoft Teams created a lot of issues for small companies and larger enterprises.

The solution's technical support team takes time to respond to users, making it an area of the tool's shortcomings where improvements are required.

There could be more integration with different platforms for the product.

Office 365 is complex in terms of creating a form. From the Microsoft team’s perspective, the interface could be improved; it should not take time to find out. As the world moves towards AI, how does Microsoft 365 Business integrate AI features? For example, you can create presentations using AI. With AI, it takes less time to convert a presentation into a more visually appealing format, such as changing the slides and adding pictures. However, there is still room for improvement in generating content based on the input provided.

There is potential for it to offer even more features such as compliance reporting and device management. Given the rapid growth of other companies, especially in product management, I believe that Microsoft 365, being widely used by organizations, could incorporate additional features to compete effectively with these fast-growing companies in the market. It could enhance its functionality, possibly through the inclusion of an Apex Gateway.

The solution’s cost could be improved.

At least a basic collaboration tool or project management tool should be included in the solution for the price we pay.

The platform’s GUI could be more simple to understand.

Microsoft 365 Business’s stability needs improvement. There are a lot of system downtimes. It could work better.

They could maintain the consistency of features and UI while updating the product. It is fine to release frequent updates, but there shouldn’t be drastic changes in operations.

The platform's pricing needs improvement.

The platform's security aspect needs improvement. They should include an inbuilt security feature.

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

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

They can improve their training materials. Sometimes, seniors are busy, so Microsoft should build training materials in local languages and add more features based on them so that there is a better understanding of functions and features.

Stability-wise, the program could be improved.

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

While using the screen sharing feature in Microsoft Teams, the screen sometimes gets stuck when we move into the remote desktop. They should work on that particular area.

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

We have OneNote, where you type something, and it's saved automatically, so if Microsoft could add that option in 365, it would help us avoid potential data loss.

I do not like Outlook. They should be able to build something better. The product could be more stable and the performance could be better. The cloud performance and the ability to work remotely are actually not very good. I prefer to work on-prem on my laptop. The quality is better.

365 Business' workflow should be better integrated into our current ERP systems. We are running two different ERP systems that are integrated, so it would make sense in the future to have those systems integrated into a content management workflow system. As it is, 365 is extremely open for integration, but it could be more seamless. Also, from an administrative point of view, it's a bit scattered. A more centralized user environment would be better.

If Business 365's documentation were better, then the user could read it and fix their issues by themselves. Microsoft could also add some more detailed pop-up troubleshooting messages. When a user has a problem, the messages they get don't help much. It would be better if the messages can troubleshoot the problem and show them exactly what the solution is. Microsoft could also add some additional training resources.

The price could be better. The user interface could be more user-friendly. Microsoft 365 Business could be more secure.

Google Docs and Google Sheets are much more flexible than Microsoft 365 Business software. Additionally, I have found one of the biggest issues with any of the Microsoft management platforms is they are tremendously unintuitive. However, you get used to it, you accept it, and you work away on it. Google is much more versatile, and they provide a different experience. That is not to say that they are better or worse. The solution could improve on the synchronization. The synchronization depends on the time of the day and what is happening in the USA. For example, when Americas wakes up, everything slows down at that point but it is to be expected. Sometimes it can take up to 24 hours to synchronize changes. The same is true for Google but they do it differently. There is a lot less frustration around Google Workspace than there is around Microsoft 365.

I would like to see more integration in the next release.

This solution could improve by having better integration with other platforms.

The price could be cheaper. The technical support could be more knowledgeable.

We would like to see the solution use more artificial intelligence bots in future releases.

When you're looking at the management of the endpoints, for example, Intune leaves a lot to be desired. If you're looking at Microsoft 365, Intune is part of that as well and Intune is kind of a nightmare. The Office platform hasn't changed too much, apart from the fact that the server backend has moved to the cloud. In the cloud, some things work a little better and then some things work a little worse than before.

The installation should be supportive of and able to integrate with Linux. The installation of Microsoft Visio should be made easy.

There is always room for improvement. They should have a consolidated app, rather than have different applications with a different app. It is a bit annoying. Consolidated apps are better than having individual apps for different applications. Recently, they have upgraded a lot. They even have the RPA for automation and RPA for using Power Automate. They even have the power apps that create the power apps themselves. They do have something in SharePoint that is not really very flexible in creating SharePoint as the internet website. If they could convert SharePoint to become an internet website where you can create your own internet website for the public, it would be much better. With SharePoint, there is always a header at the top that indicates that it is SharePoint, and most websites don't like that. If you are using a platform for SharePoint, they always have that. They could always change that to become a footer to say that it is SharePoint. People would need to look for another developer to develop a website that is not really that user-friendly from an integration perspective.

Microsoft 365 Business could improve by being more secure.

In terms of what could be improved, it has always been my question why can't we just have one solution? Everything is an add on. You've got Microsoft Office or Microsoft Business, and I think Outlook should be the primary. I think Outlook should tie into a backend database and everything should be done in the Outlook screen. When I take notes, go to the conversation with the client or my client folder, and I've got a notepad in there as I'm documenting notes, anybody in the company should see it. I should not have to then cut and paste my notes and put them into CRM or Dynamics, things of that nature. As an operation tool, there should be just one central place. I don't care where it goes from there, but my boss can then go right to Outlook and click on my customer folder and see exactly what's been happening.

We are in a medical device space and most of the time we use Microsoft Excel for tracking a lot of information. In certain specific industries, such as aerospace and medical, from the FDA or other regulatory points of view, the solution has to be validated. It would be great if that validation document is provided by Microsoft 365 Business.

Their support should be improved. They should pick the right people who are capable of resolving technical issues.

The solution could improve by providing more customization for the user interface.

Windows should be included with the solution since Microsoft is heading towards an SaaS-, cloud-based model. It should include Microsoft Windows operating system. If I am going to buy Office suite, I should also get the operating system for this purpose rather than having to worry about purchasing a Windows license and a separate one for Office 365.

When it comes to security features, the package is important. The high 11 packages offer security. While I don't consider this to be an issue, I believe Microsoft 365 Business to have better internal integration then it does with outside solutions. My main pain point concerns the licensing price, which could be lower.

The integration with other platforms could be improved. It could be easier.

I feel that the user interface can be better when it comes to file sharing. At times, it is too clumsy, especially when there is a need to go to the team channel. The user interface in respect of access and the channels can also be improved.

It would be helpful if the calendar was improved. It could be better, more user-friendly, and better integrated. If you are deleting your data and relying on backup, the backups do not exist, they are not there. The backup option should be included in Microsoft 365 Business.

Unfortunately the Teams feature doesn't allow for sharing your location which Office 365 previously had. It's important for us to be able to share that information with other team members. I'd also like to see more storage because currently OneDrive gives 1 TB of space and we'd like more of that.

Technical support could be a bit better. It's an aspect Microsoft could improve upon. The integration with the other apps could be improved. I know it's dependent on what the company might decide and maybe not from a system side, however, if they can add more apps or more integration that would be helpful.

The diagnostics is an issue that needs to be addressed, as it cannot be seen when needed. Furthermore, there is insufficient on-line information in respect of what is transpiring in real time concerning conferencing.

The solution could improve the user interface a little bit to make it easier to navigate.

They should simplify breakout rooms a bit. Breakout rooms are probably the most important factor. They have done some work on breakout rooms, but they probably have to do a bit more to make them simpler.

Areas that need improvement are pricing, stability, and scalability.

Microsoft has different tweaks on various interfaces. If you look, for example, at where the button to update Microsoft Office software is in Word, Excel, and Outlook, they're in three different places. They need to standardize the design in a lot of ways. Once you update Office, there's a button which takes you to the Microsoft website that is supposed to show what is new in the latest release of Office. It hasn't been updated for at least half a year. Right now, what's listed there is from February. Teams is, in some respects, lagging behind Skype for Business in some telephone-related features. For example, if I'm talking to you through our Jabra earpiece and if I speak on Skype for Business, and I want to end the conversation, I can press a button on my earpiece and it drops the call. However, Skype on Teams doesn't work this way. This is the telephony side and integration with voice devices could be better. In Excel, Microsoft is creating better programming functionality, which would allow you to programme without actually programming, which is easier than Visual Basic. They call it Labmda functionality in a beta release, but they have not released it yet. I wish that it would have been available already. The Office solution has collaborative capabilities, however, it's not as advanced as, for example, Google Docs. If Word colaborative work on a document works in most cases. However, in Excel, two people can work on the same document, however, it's not truly in real-time. The product can get expensive. You do need to pay for features and add-ons.

From time to time we have some issues with OneDrive. OneDrive is not perfect. It's nice, however, from time to time we have some problems specifically with reloading the replication. We have to set it up again and again. It's not very stable. The technical support process could be a bit more secure. The information should stay within the ticketing system itself and not be passed via email.

Ongoing better integration would be good. It's still not fully consistent among all the platforms running on Windows and IOS. It's getting better and better, but there's still a lot of consolidation or integration work to be done. More easily accessible training modules would be good to have. They exist, but you have to search for them. Ongoing user support and ongoing learning and education in the product, without being offensive, and making that access easier would be a big advantage over today's product. It should not be an aggressive offering, but it should be easy to find so that we don't have to dig for it.

This solution could be more secure.

It would be ideal if the product offered more integration capabilities with non-Microsoft solutions.

The cost could be a bit better. Policy integration could be improved in the current infrastructure and the current applications. The initial setup is slightly complex. There could be better integration capabilities. This could be simplified. There are lots of applications that could potentially be integrated if only the capabilities were there to do so. In general, we don't feel that there are any missing features per se. They do have a very good offering of applications.

It could be more secure, but we have not really had issues with it in terms of its security.

The pricing could be improved. The solution could work to offer better security.

It should be more secure.

Communication regarding updates is an area that can be improved. They've rolled out a lot of updates right now, but we don't know that they're coming. A feature will look different or behave just a little bit differently from day to day, and while most of the updates are great, having some sort of advanced notice that that update was coming and what they changed would be helpful. We would like some documentation regarding the updates. I would like to see a connection between their planner board, and a project for the web would be better.

Its price can be lower. It is definitely a bit expensive than other on-premises and cloud-based solutions. It can also be improved from the security aspect. We recently got the configuration of O365 components tested from an independent partner. While doing our analysis, we found certain gaps that ideally should have been covered as part of the implementation. Microsoft can look into these implementation issues and include a checklist as part of the implementation so that customers are aware of the minimum requirements for implementation.

Microsoft Teams, which is a video conferencing, chat, and collaboration tool, has some issues with video codecs. It has really bad performance, especially on the Mac OS, and requires a lot of improvements. I'm using MacBook Pro, and the performance of Microsoft Teams is disastrous. It is really unusable. Given our subscription, we get Microsoft Teams for free, but we are often opting to use Zoom or some other tool because the entire computer becomes almost unusable. New age applications should be written in a way that ensures similar performance across different operating systems. I'm not sure how it works on Windows. I assume it works better, but Microsoft needs to ensure that the performance is really good. It should provide the same kind of user experience across different platforms. They can use more efficient development tools when it comes to applications. They seem to be using a technology that uses a lot of resources on our personal computers. I know that Microsoft is pushing a lot of applications to be built in the Office 365 ecosystem, but Microsoft Teams should be a focus because it is a collaboration tool. Its performance and usability need to be better, especially in the times of COVID-19. As a part of management, I use the collaboration tools and video conferencing tools for approximately five or six hours a day. Such issues have a big business impact because the management makes decisions about the tools that are going to be used within the company. SharePoint could somehow be improved or changed to match the features of Confluence from Atlassian. There is an opportunity to do some improvements there.

They need more tutorial training about using the advanced features. It would be helpful.

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

They can improve its price and make the way of sharing documents more secure.

Other than the price, I have not had any issues with this solution.

Sometimes we have trouble with the updates that are released.

It can have more integrations with other platforms.

In the next release of this solution, there is a need to improve the integration with other platforms.

I've used the solution for so long, I am very comfortable with it. I don't recall feeling anything was missing in terms of features or capabilities. It would be ideal if there were fewer features. I'd like it better if it had a watered-down version where you didn't have to have all of this stuff included. It would just be easier to find the things that you use all the time if that were the case. For example, it has a lot of mail features I have no need for.

It could be cheaper, but I don't know if this is possible.

The time synchronization with the internet could be better, as well as the application architecture. As it is implemented on the cloud, some of the policies need to be integrated. Also, It takes some time to synchronize. It seems to replicate in eight to twelve hours within a 24-hour duration.

The pricing of the solution could be better. They should work to make the costs more competitive. In the off-chance there is a shutdown, it would be ideal if Microsoft provided some sort of alternative in order for businesses to keep functioning while the situation is dealt with. Even if it is down for ten minutes across an organization, it could prove costly.

The cost estimation can be difficult.

The solution is improved now by adding still more AI based features, and that will of very interesting to follow. Integrating to Microsoft's new VIVA products enables fantastic new features.

Overall, I can't recall feeling any features were missing. The solution meets our needs. There isn't anything that is lacking. It would be ideal if the solution offered a free version. Currently, there are only paid options available.

I thought that Skype was a part of the product's offering, however, it's my understanding that that is not the case. The Teams product in itself needs to be improved. It's not as robust as other communication tools, such as Zoom. It's unstable and it crashes often. It's been an issue throughout lockdown. They seem to have made updates on the product and yet it hasn't really improved too much.

Office 365 could be more secure.

I am pretty happy with its features. However, it could be cheaper for long-term business use.

Many things could be improved but I cannot be specific because there are so many applications.

It can have more integrations between the applications that are there within this product. In the newer version of Teams, there are some new features that allow you to share directly from Outlook, etc. It would be good if they continue to explore these types of integrations between applications.

The solution could integrate better with other products such as Skype and Zoom, at the moment it slows down the computer.

I think every product manager has to use the products by himself because I am a product manager in my company for years, I have seen rudimentary mistakes. For example, in previous versions, there were no problems with simple operations. Currently, I see unstructured development. In previous versions it was always stable, now they focus on un-useful features, instead of useful ones. Some of the functionality in the solution needs to improve. For example, when receiving a message in Outlook regarding the start of a meeting, it is not easy to connect, pick a microphone, or click the link. Some of Google services are better than the ones with this solution.

UINUX for Microsoft 10 is so heavy for our users. For my students and staff it's sometimes slow to access the application, there are connectivity issues. I think Microsoft needs to make a light version for UINUX. I'd like to see an engine included.

In terms of what could be improved, sometimes it is quite hard to get a grasp on what features are going to be available at what time. For instance, we had to wait for a very long time on the breakout rules in Teams. There is a roadmap and there are also some blog posts, but you never know when you're going to get it. So it would be preferable to get it more in advance. Because it is such a large suite of applications, it would be beneficial to have less overlap. So for instance, you have the Power Platform and you have all kinds of applications that you can use. But there's also the Teams Platform, which has an overlap with Kaizala, and Kaizala is not developed anymore. So that would be something to think about. The other feature that could be improved is the management of the Waffle, the start menu of Office 365. It is quite limited in how you can manage that menu. Some of my customers want to use it as a portal from a SharePoint perspective and they want to have some application files in there. They don't want the whole feature set. Waffle management could be better.

Their technical support could be faster. The admin portal, report generation, and other things could also be much simpler. We can't do columns adjustment at this time. The desktop app of Teams had lots of issues recently. The web version worked fine. We had to do a lot of things in terms of infrastructure and networking. It could have been better. It is quite new, so we got to bear and go with that, and then we'll see.

I would like to see cheaper licensing fees.

In Microsoft Teams, there is a lot of opportunities to improve. For example, search capabilities should be improved. When performing a search within Teams, it should also search through Outlook, files, and the other areas of the system. This is something that is missing within the collaboration platform. In the future, a dashboard should be included.

Its price could be better.

The latest update has got a lot of bugs and it is causing us problems. The stability should be improved.

I don't think that there is anything that needs to be greatly improved with this product. The user interface needs some improvement.

Its pricing plan should be better.

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.

User access costs need improvement. Previously, it was on concurrent basis access, but currently, it's on named user access. That's the biggest challenge we have, but we are looking to integrate SharePoint whereby we can have a portal where we can have the non-core users access via Sharepoint. That's what I'm looking to have an update on. So the cost is a bit of an issue.

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.

Excel hangs many times, especially when we have equations. Excel is very heavy on the hardware, and it needs powerful hardware. I hope they can enhance the performance of Excel. Other products are working well, except for Excel.

The pricing can be reduced. I don't like the number of email notifications that are sent, it's too often. I receive emails every day. It would be better to have weekly updates with one summary or have the summary every fortnight. I would like to be able to connect Power BI to data sources easily. The Enterprise level comes with gateway connectivity, and that comes with many permissions. I understand that they are concerned about security, but they don't make it easy to automatically link your Power BI workflow to your apps such as Excel, PowerPoint, data sources, Access, and to your Microsoft flow at an enterprise-level deployment. It would be good to have a back-to-back connection between applications.

Security could be improved. The user interface is good, I don't have any issues with it but everything could always be better.

The thing I think can be improved is the Teams functionalities. Teams software is like Zoom and it is more-or-less the same idea. It is less intuitive in comparison to what I was used to in Zoom. Zoom has a much more intuitive interface and is user-friendly in how you create meetings, how to participate, and how you invite people to join groups. You can do conference calls with many parties more easily using Zoom. Inside the organization where everyone else also has Teams, it is a very good tool. But if I want to have someone join that is not in my organization or using another connection method like a phone number, it is tricky. You cannot dial to regular phones which is a feature that exists in Skype for Business. The integration with other products is less fluid compared to Zoom and Skype for Business. Those products are more flexible and I am able to dial regular phones. Zoom is a much more flexible product and I may like it more because it is familiar.

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.

The licensing could be a lot easier. Right now it's complicated. The process has changed in that the user-mode of licensing is not very easy to manage. The solution's ability to scale could be improved.

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.

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.

The Team Exchange online needs improvement. Updates to the SQL server with better features are needed to compete with Oracle Database. In the next release, I would like to see more with endpoint security and with firewall security. Many other vendors are better than Microsoft in this field.

The pricing for this solution could be improved. We get caught by the exchange rates in South Africa.

It would be better if it was cheaper. There are various things that you need to use PowerShell to do. That would be good. You could do them through the management portal, rather than through PowerShell. That's the biggest improvement I would like to see.

The solution's licensing framework needs improvement. The integration of the SQL server development environment is a little bit difficult to handle. They should work to make this easier.

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.

The admin panels have too few samples. It would be better if it were expanded and more samples were added. There are monthly updates from the developer for new functionalities, but when the updates occur, you lose where the regular functionalities were. They are no longer where you are used to them being. In the next release, I would like to see visualizing. I would like this to be part of the solution, rather than independent.

Improvements can be made with the governance and compliance of this solution. The migration from tenant to tenant can be improved. There are loads of holes in security and I'd like to see better integration with security products.

The parts of the product that can be improved are the Forms and Flow features. They can be more intuitive and productive.

Cross-application integration.

I think the Skype setup could be improved. It took a bit of research to figure out how to add a group of users, and we still needed each one to add the group. It would be nice to be able to administer this remotely.

* I am very disappointed that this version does not include the Microsoft Project tool, which is essential in our area of ​​work to plan projects. * Outlook has always left me unhappy with its interfaces, although it has improved in its latest updates.