Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

The main thing we use the solution for is being able to outsource everything in the cloud while having the Exchange hosted. Having the Exchange and not having to manage the server and being able to deploy it wherever we have to is useful. We did have a number of people that traveled frequently prior to COVID. We have a handful of people that work out of their homes in various parts of the country, so having solutions that were accessible via the cloud was sort of a direction we started to migrate to several years ago in the Office 365 environment. 

The solution ensured we would never have to be premise dependent so it didn't matter where we or our employees were, or if something happened to the office. If we didn't have access to the office, we still had that access to all of our tools. We're very much a small firm so we use a lot of software services versus building our own things. We like using things that are already made.

The two biggest value adds of the solution are having the ability to outsource the email and not having to manage the email server. It's just seamless. Having the most current versions all around and having things updating frequently by themselves ensures that everybody's got access to the same software. 

In the past, we had a lot of problems with who was updated and so forth. It eliminates that problem and allows us to put it on multiple devices. It's a pretty good offering from that respect.

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.

We've been using the solution for more than five years. I can't remember exactly when we originally implemented it.

The stability is very good. It's been very stable and I haven't had any outages or things of that nature, so I'm pleased with it.

We're a small company, however, I'm familiar with other users at larger companies and they've been very pleased with the scalability. Especially people that I've talked to noted that all of a sudden this became the main thing that they were using during this work from home social distancing trend. I've heard a lot of positives about that, which is one of the reasons that we're looking to implement Teams and we're just trying to get some information on the right way to do it.

Therefore, we're hoping to expand into Teams and SharePoint and use more of those tools. We started out with the basics and we use it enterprise-wide. We're hoping that we can continue to expand into it as much as possible.

I've had very limited access to technical support. Mostly, our IT team handles any issues. Therefore, I can't really speak to the quality of there service, as I've never really dealt with them.

The initial setup wasn't complex. It was mostly straightforward. We had a few hiccups with getting emails. It wasn't as seamless as it should have been with the initial setup of the user's email so that took a lot of one on one work with our IT staff who were constantly working with the end-users to get the phone and computer and everything all connected. However, since the original deployment, setting up new employees has been better.

The problem for us was that the automatic setup didn't work the way it should have. Typically, you just put in the password and it automatically sets everything up. IT had to go in and tweak things on people's accounts. From my perspective, and again, this was five, six, seven years ago, I remember it was more of an issue with how Microsoft reacted as opposed to what we were doing.

We do monthly billing, however, I'm not sure what the exact costs are. We may pay around $1,000/month.

We started using the Microsoft Teams and we've started doing the conference call feature, so that's another $4 an account and we have a few accounts using that right now.

We're Microsoft customers. We aren't resellers or consultants.

We have a fairly robust version of the solution, although I don't recall the exact version number offhand. 

In terms of what I would advise other organizations, I would say it's worthwhile and I would do it as quickly as you can because for what you get, it's a really good bang for the buck while being pretty easy to use. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are cloud service providers for Microsoft. We offer it as a service to our customers and we are heavy users of Microsoft products.

We use this solution in our office for email and communication through SharePoint and Teams. We maximize the use of the forms that are also included in Office 365.

As the head of our technology solutions group, I use it also for tracking, and surveys within the team. I share the forms with the team and I am able to receive responses from the team. 

I had used Excel and Word for many years even before I started using this solution.

In the past, offices had to install their own Exchange, but with Office 365 we can enjoy the email that is bundled with it, which is Outlook. 

I enjoy using Teams, Outlook, the forms that are provided, and SharePoint because it connects all of us within the team.

We are able to share all of our worksheets, and the collaboration is valuable. This is what makes the Teams feature the part I enjoy the most in this solution.

The storage, cloud storage, and forms are very useful.

There is a lot of documentation available that is easy to comprehend and follow.

I have yet to explore all of what this solution offers. At this time, my focus is on learning more about Teams, especially the forms and the collaboration.

The area that consumes a lot of my time is auditing. I am responsible for handling the licenses and was not happy with the amount of time spent during the auditing process.

There is always room for improvement.

I started with this company three years ago and that is when I started using Microsoft 365 Business.

Microsoft 365 Business is a stable product.

I have not yet experienced expanding this solution. It provides me with enough resources and enough service. For now, scalability is not something that I am concerned with.

We have not contacted the technical support of Microsoft. We have our own technical support team who can support us.

The last time that I had an issue, it was easily resolved by our team. They were able to resolve it easily.

We also provide Hyper-V. We offer the operating system of Microsoft and bundle it when we offer servers for our customers.

I use solutions other than Microsoft 365 Business. I also use SQL, the Windows Server Operating System, and the CALs. I find that CALs is a bit more complicated but because there is a lot of support available, I am able to figure it out. When I ask for clarification and the correct sizing, they provide me with that.

More of us should be more aware of the usage of CALs and how it really works with the operating system.

I was not involved in the initial setup as we have an in-house IT team who is responsible for the installation.

I find the pricing of Microsoft 365 Business to be reasonable. With the other products such as SQL database, they are expensive.

There is a free license with Microsoft, which is the SQL Express. But it would be better if they could improve, or make adjustments to have higher limitations.

The Express is limited based on the capacity of the memory and processor. If my requirements go beyond those limitations then I have to go to the standard edition, which is very expensive.

I would like to see adjustments made to the limitations in SQL Express. It would be very helpful.

I am really very happy using this solution. I am comfortable using it and have asked my team to offer this solution and I have included it as a part of our portfolio.

I encourage my team to offer this solution to some of our customers who are not yet with Office 365.

We have our own management portal and we are partners with Microsoft.

I would definitely recommend this solution to anyone who is not yet using it.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a nine out of ten.

I  use it for Microsoft Excel, which helps with data analysis. It integrates Power BI, allowing us to perform various slicing and dicing of data.

Mostly, I have only used Microsoft 365 Business for emails and PowerPoints as of now.

The solution includes most of the things we need. We can use it to integrate other source systems as well, like Power BI.

It's helpful to even use it to build queries, like Microsoft queries. We can write SQL queries by joining two tables present in Excel itself. So, it's like having two tables in separate sheets, and we can build a query using a common column as a join condition. We can see the key dataset with common columns using the join condition. 

Moreover, we can also perform outer joins, making Microsoft 365 Business ideal for data analysis as well.

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

I've been using it for the past around one year. We currently use the latest version.

It is a scalable solution. There are over 10,000 end-users in our organization. It is extensively used in our organization. We do have plans to increase the usage.

For example, I primarily use Excel in Microsoft 365 Business. So, we have options like Excel options; we have add-ins. So under the data tab, we have a data streamer, and we also have Microsoft Power Query for Excel. So using these, we can include the data-related menu bar in Excel software.

The setup is straightforward. We have Excel, and we can use it as it is. It might need an add-in to be included.

We need maintenance primarily for data analysis. We use it to analyze the data, especially when we have a large dataset that we want to segregate and analyze specifically for a particular functionality. In such cases, we can use Excel for slicing and dicing the data. It allows us to focus on a specific chunk of data to make informed decisions.

The deployment was done by our in-house team. It's a direct tool like Microsoft Excel, but there is an add-in that can be used to integrate with other source systems. It may extend the functionality.

We don't have a separate deployment process. Excel is a file that we have as part of Microsoft Office. It's a direct use, but we might need to include an add-in to display or the data-related menu in the Excel menu bar.

There would be licensing costs because Microsoft 365 Business requires a product key and a license to be present in order to use its products, including Excel and other supportive products.

I would suggest you to start using Excel as a basic step because Excel has its own formulas and functions. They can begin with lookups in Excel and then subsequently move ahead with building queries. 

If a person has only Excel to work with, they can start with that. But they would need to have Microsoft 365 Business to proceed further with other features.

Based on the Excel work that I have done using Excel, which is a part of Microsoft 365. So, for Excel, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Therefore, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use the program for Excel, PowerPoint, Word, etc.

Stability-wise, the program could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for five years. I am using the latest version.

I rate the software’s stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes, I have to restart the PC.

Microsoft 365’s scalability depends on the subscription plans. It might cost around R300 per month.

The initial setup is straightforward. Its installation part is easy and takes around 40 minutes to complete. If you use Microsoft Office 2016, deinstall it entirely before installing the software. It is essential to have backups of its previous versions on your system.

The program is inexpensive. The license allows five users to access it at the same time.

It is an excellent and powerful program. Customers are upgrading the old Microsoft Office packages to 365 as it is the future. I rate it a ten out of ten.

Everyone in our organization uses Office, including PowerPoint, SharePoint, Teams and Outlook.

The solution is nice and straightforward. They are in the process of expanding everything to the mobile to allow for integration between it. 

The acrylic solution could be improved. There is an error in the languages which creates a very big problem. In Hebrew one writes from right to left, not the converse. Customers receive emails in which the English word appears at the beginning instead of the end. This makes reading challenging. There is still an issue with the Greek language. 

We have been using Microsoft 365 Business since the beginning. 

The solution is very stable.

Thes solution is scalable. 

The technical support, being Microsoft, is good. Usually, there are no problems with the solution, as it is used by everybody, from secretaries to professionals. 

As the solution is cloud-based, the installation is straightforward. 

The licensing costs are not expensive. The prices are okay. Nowadays, Office 365 is available and I see companies working with this. It can also be rented monthly or bought on-premises. 

The payment terms can vary. One who rents Office 365 will accrue a monthly cost. One who rents the on-premises version of Office from Microsoft, as opposed to its cloud-based counterpart, will have the option of paying for it annually or purchasing a single license with support. 

Microsoft offers many features. When one buys a Microsoft license, he pays for everything inclusively, including Windows, Office, databases, BI and other Microsoft solutions. Everything is visible. One does not pay for the individual components but for the solution itself. 

Everybody uses Office. I am not aware of a single customer who does not. I think this rule applies to everyone in Israel uniformly. 

The number of people using the solution matches the size of the population in the country. 

I don't believe that use of Microsoft 365 Business over some other solution is really optional. This said, those using Apple or Mac have the option of going with OpenOffice, but 99 percent of the Israeli market goes with Microsoft and Windows, in which Office comes bundled in it. Perhaps in the United States this is different, as they have a much greater propensity to use Mac.

I rate Microsoft 365 Business as a ten out of ten. everyone uses it and there is really no alternative available. While the market makes available other choices, they cannot compete with Microsoft. There is the OpenOffice option, which I believe is employed with Mac and Apple. 

I work for a contact center in Guatemala and this is a contact center platform. We use the 365 tools for our daily operations including email and back office tools. We're customers of Microsoft and I'm the telephony manager. 

Videoconferencing using teams allowed us to keep our meeting cadence during the transition to working from home. SharePoint allowed us to keep sharing content for mobile and work from home users without breaking the company security protocols.

We completed the transition to Microsoft outlook company wide Data leak prevention policy templates added the additional security required for WFH.

We have 5,000 employees and 75% are working from home. It's very stressful when you're video conferencing and you can't disable your own video feeds. I'm always having to look at myself during a conference call. One of our consultants suggested disabling our own self video feed to reduce the stress during a long conference call. It's something small but it bothered everybody.

The other issue is when you want to connect the publicly accessible telephone network to Teams, it requires a paid service and additional models and hardware. If I invite you to a Teams session, you need to have Teams installed. It requires a specific phone connection and for you to have a phone in order to dial into the conference switch. Zoom has a pool of telephone lines already included in the base service and you can just call up the conference number without needing to install anything. That's not the case with Microsoft. 

I've been using this solution for three years.

The tool works, but we have had a couple of blackouts. It was a global problem where the entire platform started behaving badly. The more you rely on the tool, the bigger the concern is for a cloud platform, but so far so good. We had a couple of issues, but that was worldwide. Of the 5,000 people in the company, probably half of them are users.  

We have three people in the company responsible for setup and the actual migration, and they deal with upkeep and any problems. We'll increase use for everybody because we're continuing to work from home and this is going to be the defacto communication tool for our working from home agents. 

We previously used Google but moved to Microsoft.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did it ourselves and we paid for gold support, so we just raised a couple of questions, but it was pretty straightforward. Implementation took about one month. 

Employees are working from home and this solution has enabled us to continue functioning. 

Licensing is on an annual basis. 

It's important to take advantage of the adoption project managers at Microsoft. Our initial setup was without hiccups, but the team at Microsoft responsible for the early adoption for a successful implementation are key. They really helped with the initial setup. When you start from zero, it's not as intuitive as you might think and it helps to have people with more knowledge to point you in the right direction. It's not rocket science, but trying to do it yourself can be a nightmare. 

The product lacks features and is quite expensive so I rate this solution a nine out of 10.

We use this solution to drive our email services and for collaborations of spreadsheets or word documents.

Also, the OneDrive is used for storage, which allows you to access your files from anywhere.

The bundle we have comes with the office installation to the CCM on the user's work tools. When you are working on your documents, you can easily sync them to the one online. It is much more seamless when it comes to accessing documentation and collaborating with other people on the same projects. It is essentially what we use Office 365 for. 

It is easy to use.

It's painless.

If they want to encourage more usage, the pricing should be looked at. The pricing should be in a way where we can leverage the E5 functionality. 

The security section of the solution is also something that is of great concern, especially now that a lot of people are doing work from home. You need the Microsoft Intune solution to help protect your documentation, your documents, and to keep your data confidential.

Lower license options should come embedded with security.

I have been using Microsoft 365 Business for a few years.

In terms of it being scalable, you can practically use it for anything you want to use it for.

We have approximately 480 staff members who are using it.

Everyone has a mailbox account.

I have not contacted technical support. It's pretty straightforward. We have a lot of resources online to guide you. 

We have not called Microsoft for anything.

It's a cloud-based solution, so there really isn't any installation. You are given admin credentials.

You can download the office tools from the cloud and you can apply your licenses to start working and activate your account.

It is quite expensive.

If I wanted to improve it, I would look at the way they price their models, for example, Microsoft is breaking the license models into sections such as E1, E3, and E5.

The E5 license is quite expensive. Most of our users have an E3 license essentially due to cost.

I think that Microsoft Office is the number one solution for organizations. I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a nine out of ten.

This solution is used for everything, the task, and the teams. It is a collaboration of all of the applications that are found in Office 365, but with one interface in which you can communicate between people.

We have some that have been deployed on a hybrid cloud, others that are just cloud, and some that are hybrids with an Active Directory that is on-premises and connected through Windows Azure. It connects to the cloud to sync all of the users from our campus.

For email assistance, or SharePoint or for sharing drives, it is all the cloud.

One of the O365 applications that made a huge impact is the Microsoft Teams that enhanced our communication in sharing files with online modification and execution helped in focusing our conversations and divide them into channels to have an efficient and effective output. Also chatting has been evolved to be not only sharing text but also solving problems instantly due to the ease of communication (Chat, Voice, Video). Work-From-Home became much easier then you can even imagine with O365.

These are the main things that help the business collaborate.

• At the same time, you can share files, you can send emails on the spot, and you can also assign meetings on the spot.
• You can have conference calls with different parties using video and voice.

It saves a lot of time. When opening a new business, you need the main server, file sharing, and you need to secure them.

Not only to have them there on-site or on-premises, you need to have them backed up, and archived. So rather than going for a new place, with a new Internet, we go to Cloud and it will provide everything that we need.

You're not restricted to a certain place or certain country. You can work from any place on Earth, from any device, without having your laptop.

This is one of the main factors, and that it is secured. This is also a big advantage.

They have already made some improvements to the interface and dashboards that have made a positive impact.

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.

I have been using this solution for one year.

This solution is stable.

In our team, we don't have many users. We are in the early stages of migration.

Other companies that I work with have approximately three hundred or four hundred in different countries and the other sites I have one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and thirty users.

This solution is scalable.

The technical support needs time to understand your problem to help you, because of the language barrier. It takes time to solve certain things.

In the Gulf area, most people call in Arabic and want to translate to English. The problem is the Technical support does not understand English well, so it takes time to explain what the problem is when it could be a simple issue to resolve.

This doesn't represent all of the technical support, maybe 75% is good.

We have Google. Google is good, but I was not familiar with the application and the tasks because most of the time I have worked with Microsoft. They have the same features, but I didn't find that Google was easy to work with applications.

They have evolved a lot but there are still some laps between them like an on-premises exchange and Lotus Notes.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Within thirty minutes you will have your site up and running, including emails and shared folders.

Even if you need more options, like profiles and hierarchies, it is straightforward. You just go ahead and add them.

For a new business with twenty people, you will need approximately two or three days maximum to have all the sites up and running for all services.

I did the implementation myself. I did not use any vendors or integrators.

The return on investment is very high for companies whose work is based on communications.

This is targeted for countries with unstable internet. As an example, in our region you don't know when the internet will go off, we have now been without the internet for over a week. This is a problem for people who have on-premises deployments and need to connect to the internet.

For new businesses, rather than having a lot of servers, they can go online. Most people have 4G on the mobiles so they can just search it on their mobile. The Internet is not an issue.

After the last update that was made, you are not obliged to take the same license for all of your users. For example, if you go for E1 it is $12 USD per month for every person.

Now you can select different licenses, for example, if somebody doesn't need all of the features, it would cost $8 USD per month and if they didn't need the email application then it would cost $6 USD per month.

This solution requires a lot of money. It's a huge expense and it's a concurrent expense. You don't just pay it once, it's going to be continuous and you pay annually.

Unless there is a huge impact on the business, then it would be worth going for it. If there is no impact on the business then you can use it on-premises and work with the old office.

I would recommend this solution for newly opening businesses that need collaboration and communication that requires the internet but doesn't need a fixed place to work. They should go with Office 365.

They are going to pay every year but they will be saving a lot of money for electricity and maintenance for the telephone, voice, VOIP, IP telephones, internet, and subscriptions.

The security is also important, it's not exposed to everybody. 

You won't need an IT department because one person can handle everything.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.