Office 365 Review

• 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.