What needs improvement with Office 365?

Office 365 could be easier to use at first. Tutorials are needed to know how to use the solution.

We find that there is an abundance of features. Nothing is missing for us right now. We have found that, with Teams, if you are including one more person who is not in the company ecosystem, supposedly I'm inviting them as a guest in the chat. However, when I do that, I can't share files.

I don't see any areas of improvement right now in terms of features. That said, I'd like to see them add more features in the future in order to continue to advance the product.

Based on my experience and the tasks that I handle, for my customers, I didn't notice that there is any need for improvement. It would be a fantastic opportunity if their solution could be used in combination with VoIP software, allowing you to combine VoIP software and Office 365 on a single platform.

Microsoft Defender for Office 365 could use some customization, but it's trivial.

It seems like every other week when we log into the administrative portals, it doesn't matter which one, it could be the active directory portal, it could be the exchange admin center or SharePoint admin center, it seems like Microsoft is consistently updating with new versions of the admin centers, which can be frustrating. This is due to the fact that, if you haven't been on in a while, sometimes it takes a good hour or two to reorient yourself -especially when you're trying to find a setting. We went through an assessment about four months ago and I had the hardest time finding certain settings in my baselines. Just being able to demonstrate something as simple as an audit log, when they move things around, can be challenging. It seems like at least once or twice a month. It gets a little confusing. On the endpoint protection side, they've done a merge with both our security center and their compliance center. You can do multiple things from doing the same thing, however, for multiple admin sites. You get used to like one and then it takes you to another. It gets a little cumbersome or confusing as the outlays are different, the menus are a little bit different. That's one of my biggest gripes about it. Sometimes, if we have a user that is doing some work from home, for example, and they're not on their corporate laptop and they're on their regular laptop, or vice versa, and they have like a personal Office 365 license, they sometimes conflict with each other, which then puts the person into an authentication loop, which basically means they can't access their stuff properly. We're running into that problem, actually, with one of our users right now. For some reason, there were three different Office products that were loaded on there. A regular Office 365, Office 365 Business, and then Office 365 Enterprise. How all three of them got on there, we're not quite sure. He can open up some of his documents normally that are stored on his machine from the OneDrive, yet, when they try to open up documents that are in SharePoint, every now and then, depending on the updates that are pushed out by Microsoft, they can't open up the documents. At that point, you kind of like have to uninstall or do an online repair of the Microsoft Office itself, and then re-install it. Due to this issue, you're losing productivity time. This guy just happens to be our corporate recruiter. We're losing time with him being able to look at resumes and stuff like that, or look at qualifications or statements of work and stuff like that. We've been working for about two hours and yeah, I mean, he can download the document and open it up, but he can't actually open it up while it's in SharePoint. When you don't have that, when you lose that capability, especially like when they're working on proposals and when time is of the essence, it can become a big issue. Sometimes when the software pushes security patches it breaks, Windows wide.

Data protection and email security are almost the same for all the organizations, irrespective of their segment (SMB or enterprises), with standard subscription at least basic Data loss prevention and Advance threat protection can be enabled for SMB segments, it is available in enterprise version / Premium versions. For basic business subscriptions, Microsoft can think of providing PC and mobile management features to enable good security for data in different devices (It comes with additional cost). Overall Microsoft can think of providing DLP and ATP (at least some basic) options to Small and Medium organizations (Its already available for premium and enterprise customers).

In terms of improvement, a better help bar would be good. I find it's generally not very helpful and I have to search online.

I started working a lot on Microsoft Teams and I find it a bit vast. It should be divided out a bit so that someone can use it for basic functionality, like audio, video, and calls. Then, if someone wants more advanced functionality for file sharing and team creation, and so on, they could use a separate app. I would prefer it as separate options (advanced vs basic). Currently, it is all bundled in one big product and it's confusing.

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.

Sometimes the synchronization between the desktop and online is a little bit slow. Office 365 would be improved if the CRM integration were better.

In terms of improvement, it should have tutorials when you first have the opportunity to use it, to be able to really learn it. It can be complex in the beginning.

I would like to see the macro functionality in Excel made simpler. Excel should be made more intelligent in terms of being able to figure out data types. For example, it should understand that if I have 16,000 records, it should know the datatype of each of the columns. There might be numbers, dates, and other types of data, and it should be able to recognize these based on context. If this were the case then it would make things easier for me. I would like to see Azure artificial intelligence available in Office 365 so that it is available to everyone.

Integration with other platforms can be improved. As it is now, it works really well with Azure and other products from Microsoft. However, if you want to integrate something outside of this, especially with Excel, it gives us challenges. There are a lot of use cases in Excel where we want to integrate with other services.

The security should be improved.

The product could be improved if there was integration with other single sign-on solutions that are available on the market. I'd also like to see integration with other privileged identity or access management solutions. If there are only particular solutions that we have to go with and other market leaders have other solutions that we'd like, then that becomes costly. If they came up with more access or solution integrations that were less expensive, then that would be helpful. Microsoft should come up with some documentation or presentation related to specific use cases. There are times when companies or organizations migrate to Office 365, but they are not aware of each and every feature that's available and that they could be using. I think they should have special feature-based training sessions, where information can be shared with users. It can be subdivided into departments whether it's accounting, HR, technical.

There's a matter of sharing with other users. If someone is working on it or disconnects from the mutual storage, I need to save it as is and I need to override it. I cannot work together with other users on the same document. That may be possible on the cloud version of Office 365, however, I'm not sure as we use the desktop version. This is one issue we have with the solution. If two people update the same file, it causes issues.

I'm not sure if there are areas of improvement. For us, it's working quite well.

One part of the suite that can be improved is their online applications. Those are quite limited compared to the desktop applications and this can make them more difficult to use. That is one area of improvement that Microsoft should address. The cost is a big challenge. It is really quite expensive and puts quite a strain on our budget. Because of that, we have to set a limitation on the use of the online application and the distribution of user licenses. If the pricing were more friendly, we might want to get more people using the product. The pricing is really the key feature that holds us back from making more and better use of the product.

In general, the desktop apps could be a little leaner and open faster in less powerful machines. The interface for Outlook could use a refresh, to make it more like the other software in the suite. Integration between Outlook calendar and Google Calendar would be a good improvement since many of our team use Android phones and personal Gmail accounts as their main calendar application.

Using Visual Basic, I have had a lot of trouble with relative paths when programming for Excel, and sometimes it is very difficult to debug programs. For example, if the user has their focus on a different sheet, one that you do not expect, then the program begins to behave unexpectedly. This means that you cannot use relative paths, and you have to use absolute paths. Microsoft could issue warnings if you are programming in a way that might have side effects. There is a problem with the Microsoft Office documentation in terms of undocumented features. When you are programming and there is an undocumented and unexpected behavior in the background, it can be very painful to find the bugs.

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.

The feature to convert PDF file to a Word document needs improvement as well as the feature to save the file automatically when typing, without using the save command.

Improvements can be made to the products generic offering. It's not customized for health care. It doesn't understand the meaning of health care related concepts. Providing a greater degree of industry specificity would make the tool much more unique and valuable. I would like to see a more user-friendly interface in the next release. We worked with a developer to upgrade the settings and optimize the base functionality. If the UI was more intuitive, all the user would need to do is click through.

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.

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

They should stop releasing new features and focus on making the existing ones work. Their support is so terrible and unusable except during dire emergencies.