Microsoft 365 Business Reviews

From an Office 365 perspective, I would say that Teams and SharePoint and Planner are the most used. What Office 365 offers as a package is what is being at this moment used in the organization for us to work. At this moment, we are not so physically in the office. The majority of us are working remotely and across countries, across regions. The way for us to collaborate together and work together was by using more and more of Office 365 components.

Previously, you had the inconvenience that if you sent an Excel file to someone, you could not work together on the same file, and now you can. With the components that we have available, several people can be working on the same document, at the same time, doing the changes, doing the updates that they need to do. It makes the collaboration and the work more efficient.

We can touch base with our clients and we can touch base internally with our solutions without impacting the work or suffering from a lower speed. The performance and the efficiency of our planning and roadmap are extremely good.

The solution can scale up or down easily to meet the needs of any organization.

The solution is stable.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

Technical support is quite helpful and responsive.

It would help, if, in the beginning, there was an onboarding process to show how to set it up properly or how to set up the things properly, or how to have the support they need or the guidance on how they should deploy it. In some cases, there are things that are not so crystal clear. The platform is evolving all the time. It's not that you have, let's say, a quarterly release or a yearly release. Every month there's always something new. That's the reason why it's sometimes difficult to follow up as, in different components, in different areas, the features are evolving also.

They need to give more guidance or some video training or try to understand more what the organization is trying to build or accomplish and assist them on their journey. That sometimes is difficult. The companies, for example, sometimes don't know where they want to go. Only after a few years do they have some certainty. IF a big package is being offered to a company, they should be able to sit the decision-makers down and say "Okay, this is what we have. This is what the tools can do, what the tools can offer you." It would give them really important insights. If they have those insights, then they can make a more, let's say, clear decision.

They should show more examples or POCs. They should be able to say "Okay. I can show you, for example, how this solution was beneficial for our Coca-Cola client." I know Microsoft has several clients with various solutions. It's just a question for them to show the portfolio of each solution, and how the solution was going to develop, and how the solution was deployed to those organizations. Then, potential clients can say "Oh, great. I can reuse this solution for my organization." They don't need to think about how they would use the features from scratch when they can have already something that was, let's say, POC developed.

We've been using the solution for years at least at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is very stable. Even when multiple people are working on the same document, you don't get any sow downs. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is very scalable and the company is evolving to meet the demands. Microsoft is constantly providing packages and creating packages the allow for more efficient collaboration. They have options for small, medium, and large companies. It suits businesses of all sizes and makes everyone's life much easier. 

We do plan to continue to use the solution.

We've dealt with technical support in the past, and they've always been very good. They are knowledgeable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support they provide.

It's my understanding that the initial setup is straightforward. It's an IT process. Since it's a cloud solution, every machine has it. You just need an organization email account which allows you to create an account. All the products are automatically assigned to you. The product is based on a subscription model which allows companies to level up or level down depending on the profile of the user. You can offer the user a certain package, or you can offer him an enterprise-level option with basically everything. That way he can have more components and more functionalities that allow him to do his work.

We had found members of the technical team that handled deployment.

Deployments depend on the company. You may need some security, some administrative individuals, or some IT or ServiceNow team members to keep up with the requests or changes or updates that are required to be done in the tool. Depending on the package that we're talking about or depending on the options that you have, not all the users have admin privileges. Random users therefore may need to make a request from an admin user, and that has to go through a ServiceNow process. Everything depends on how the organization wants to set up that structure. 

You need someone with an Office 365 background or an administration background, to be able to install what is required or to know what is required. You need someone from a security perspective to make sure that there is no breaches. You might need someone for the network also. 

You may need some SharePoint administrator if it's, let's say, topics related to SharePoint. You may need a Teams administrator if it's related to Teams. You may need someone with, let's say, Power Automate or Power Flow expertise and knowledge to also answer those inquiries. It's a deck of people that may be required. If they are going to, let's say, govern the full Office 365 package,  you may need the different people with different expertise or different knowledge across the different components and of each product. 

Our IT team handles the implementation and deployment. When they give the laptop to us to work, they already have installed all the components there. Of course, there are certain components that you can install separately. For example, Power BI. You need to install it separately. However, the Power platform, Power Flow, Power Automate, Microsoft Teams, are already incorporated into the Office 365 account. Since it's a cloud solution, it is installed by default based on the user profile that the user has.

I use this solution in a larger organization. They have an enterprise-level package.

The cost depends on the package. If you're working on an E3 license, it depends also on the contract that you have with Microsoft. There is the standard package if you don't have your own business and you are an independent user so that you pay the cost of markets. However, if you are a large enterprise, usually there's an agreement between vendor management and Microsoft to say, "Okay, we have this amount of people. We want this cost more or less to be applied." The cost usually is less than what is in the higher in the market. It differs from contract to contract.

At this moment, we have a great contract with them. The cost that we're paying for it is affordable. The only thing is, some companies may need some additional support, and for Microsoft to follow up with the evolution on the platforms that they have. Sometimes the companies lack some knowledge or some experience.

At this moment, due to the COVID situation, the majority of the things that are being used in the organization are related to Office 365 products. There was a big expansion of Microsoft Teams, for example, and it's one of the most used components inside the organization. We use it not only for meetings but for other tasks such as importing Power BI reports inside of Microsoft Teams.

We have the solution deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. Right now it's more cloud-driven. In the past, there were some things that were on-premise components. At the moment, due to COVID, almost everything is cloud-based. That allows the collaboration to be more efficient. That means you can have several people working on the same document or the same space at the same time. 

We're using the latest version of the solution.

I would recommend this solution to other companies. 

I would rate it nine out of ten.

We are using it for file sharing, office applications, email, and SharePoint.

We use Microsoft solutions for everything that we do. A part of our software development is done in .NET using Visual Studio and development tools. We use Azure Cloud Platform, and we are also providing services to our client's clients. It would be hard to imagine using something else because we are so used to using Microsoft tools. It is something that you count on having.

Everything gets integrated. Different services that they provide are well integrated into the entire system, which is the biggest strength of Microsoft products. Everything works together. If I create a Microsoft Teams theme, I get a SharePoint site and planner. Everything, including permissions, is scoped, which is really nice.

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. 

We have been using this solution for six or seven years.

It is stable if we exclude the issues with Microsoft Teams. I am the technical director of a company that has 130 employees. I don't remember experiencing any kind of issues. There was an outage for a very short period of time about three months ago, but it was nothing bad. Its stability is great.

It is scalable. Everything that we use is based on a cloud source. It is pretty scalable, especially for our needs.

It is used by the entire company. It is an official tool for document management and business apps. We have 130 employees. Its usage will increase. We have the intention to grow as a company, so we will increase its usage accordingly.

We didn't have too much of a need for technical support or any kind of support, but when we needed it, it was okay. I don't remember which support plan we are subscribed to, but it works okay. 

It is pretty much straightforward. It cannot be configured for the first time by someone who is not trained to configure it. You need help from basically your cloud service provider (CSP). Your CSP will provide resources to do the initial configurations. Such tools are not easy to configure for the first time, but everything else is pretty much intuitive. If you have an IT background, it should be intuitive and easy.

Its price is what you would expect today from a software-as-a-service offering. It is somewhere around $10 per user per month.

I would advise making sure that someone experienced with Microsoft Office 365 platform and ecosystem is leading your organization. Otherwise, find a great partner to help you and guide you through the implementation process.

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten. A couple of things can be better.

We primarily use the solution for email, collaboration, some business applications like Sharepoint, and the Exchange server.

For example, we have depended heavily on it for our remote work capability, we have worked 100% remotely since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

The email on offer is very nice. It's very easy to use. We've enjoyed that aspect so far. It's very clearly laid out.

We can easily collaborate between users with. We can share and work on documents, for example. 

The solution has the capabilities to help me organize my week.

The product is very proactive. They know there are issues before we report them and they alert us to the fact that they are working to fix things.

For the most part, the solution is very user-friendly.

The initial setup is extremely straightforward.

Microsoft is having some issues now and therefore it may not be the best time to evaluate them. However, they acknowledge that they have the issues. They are working to fix things.

The stability is a real issue right now. It's something that they need to fix.

It's a bit complex in itself when you get into items such as security or compliance. That said, if you're knowledgeable it's no trouble. We are excited to see the end result after the various roll outs that MS is currently carrying on.

I've been using the solution for years. It's been a long time. I have quite a bit of experience with the product.

The stability is not so good. It's an aspect of the solution we really don't like. They need to work on this. There is some stability, however, there are some issues with integrations. I am assuming that these recent stability issues stem from the various rollouts and integration activities that MS is carrying out to better improve the solution.

The solution scales easily. If you want to add people, you simply add them. However, that means you need to buy more licenses, so your cost will go up.

Support can be a bit better, however, they are quite good at being proactive. Usually, they know there is a problem before we do, and by the time we reach out they are working on a fix of some sort.

Some of their support is AI as well, which means that over time, as it learns, it will get better and more effective. Basically, it needs to be a bit more robust. It needs to be more flexible in terms of understanding what you're looking for. That will likely come /improve with time.

We did use Outlook and Exchange, however, the ease of managing a SaaS versus on-prem meant it was more scalable and it's easy to manage. We didn't have to bother with any back-end integration.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It was straightforward for our team. Basically, you log in online and download the software and everything is basically automatically set up so it's easy. You don't have to worry about complexities.

The deployment just takes a few minutes. It's very fast and easy. Of course, the download time depends on the speed of your internet.

We handled the process ourselves. We did not need the assistance of an integrator or consultant. It was all done in-house.

A bit of a tough one to calculate for MS365 but I would say that it is positive, very positive.

The licensing is flexible. You can pay yearly or monthly. It's up to you.

The overall cost is relative. There aren't a lot of other mainstream options, except for maybe Google Email.

Google Apps

We are using the latest version of the solution at this point. I cannot recall the exact version number, however. It may be the 2019 release.

Currently, we have about 30 people on our team.

We do plan to continue to use the solution going forward. We have no plans to change to something else.

I'd recommend this solution to other organizations. I would rate it at an 8 out of 10. The collaboration capabilities we have now are amazing. We really appreciate what it empowers us to achieve.

We use it for normal office applications.

Its interface looks clean, and its performance seems quite fast. It is faster than our previous app.

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

We started to use it around last year. 

It is stable.

I don't know if it is scalable or not. In terms of users, we are in the transition process to upgrade to this solution. Currently, not all users are using it. If it is given to our whole staff, we would have 30,000 users. We plan to keep using this solution and expand its usage.

We have our own technical team, and we contact them for any issues. If they need further help with a specific issue, they contact Microsoft support.

We have been using only Microsoft products. We were earlier using the other version of Office.

It was done by our technical team. We don't need a team to manage this. We just need to manage the license and contract. We have a small team that does the license and contract management.

We have an enterprise license, and we get some price off for that. Its price could be better for companies that are not using it massively.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a seven out of ten.

Students use it mostly for sending emails, storing their documents, and collaborating.

Office products such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are strong points of this solution.

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.

I have been using this solution for some time.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We have around 2,000 users, and we want to increase the usage.

We get support from Microsoft through their local dealers. Their support is fine.

We are also using Google Suite. Microsoft 365 has a price attached, whereas Google Suite is free for educational institutions. Microsoft 365 has got popular applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, whereas Google Suite has got similar products that do the same thing, but they are not very popular.

It was straightforward.

I installed it myself.

They are always a bit pricey. They should reduce their prices or make it free because we already have other solutions, like Google Suite, which are cheaper or free.

If you can afford it, then go for it. It is a good product.

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

Currently, we are using Microsoft 365 Business purely as a mailing solution and just for storing the data on OneDrive.

Microsoft 365 Business is a really good product. Microsoft provides many solutions like Microsoft Teams, which is useful for Team utilization across the globe, especially in this COVID 19 kind of scenario. 

If you enable the enhanced security in Microsoft Teams by using the given options, you can eliminate the third-party solutions like WhatsApp, Telegram. You can easily share your communication, which is much better. You can also collaborate. For example, instead of creating an Excel sheet on your local PC and sending it across to someone over email, you can just share it. SharePoint is one of the best tools to be implemented.

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.

I've been using Microsoft 365 Business since 2009. 

In the initial stage of Microsoft Office 365, I was working with a major automobile company in India. We were given the opportunity to evaluate the solution completely in and out. It was a cloud-based solution, and our business or traveling users were eager to have this kind of solution. The expenditure as compared to the in-house solution was much lesser. There were many bugs at that time. Now, it's very good for one product.

Then I joined a multinational conglomerate, which was into a lot of businesses such as oil, shipping, large estates, and so on. Everything was there under one entity. We were successful in rolling out Microsoft 365 Business over there. 

In my current organization, I was given the opportunity to evaluate Microsoft 365 Business, and we started to use it.

I would say it is super. 

It is one of the best. Currently, we have around 8000 users. 

My team had contacted them, and they said that it's very good. From the support aspect, basically, you have to get a paid one. If you don't have any good enterprise agreement, it takes nearly eight to nine hours for them to come across a problem and solution. It lags in support. That's all. You have to pay a lot of money.

In my current organization, we were using an open-source free product Zimbra. Of course, an initial amount was paid for the licensing part. Because it was open-source, there were a lot of spams, and there was no protection for the email. Finally, a word was put across to my colleagues who were evaluating different products, and I said that Office 365 is the best one to go for. I was given the opportunity to evaluate, and it came into existence.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's a plug-and-play kind of scenario. It's very easy, but not as easy as Apple products.

The migration part from Zimbra took a long time, around three to four months. The deployment took around two to three weeks. 

Microsoft 365 Business will be good to have if you have a large organization where you have more than 3000 employees. Other cheaper solutions, like Gmail, are easily available in the market.

Microsoft Exchange is very good, and people are used to it. Gmail will be a big competitor for Microsoft later on when Gmail moves out of the comfort zone they are currently in. 

Gmail lags a lot as compared to Microsoft Office 365, which is very neat, clean, and easy to deploy. Any admin with one year or six months of experience can easily deploy Microsoft Office 365.

Even though this is the year of the cloud, I will suggest that instead of the cloud deployment, go for the in-house deployment.

Microsoft 365 Business is the best when your business is growing up and you want to collaborate using these tools. In my current organization, we don't explore Microsoft 365 Business much. If you see the Microsoft product portfolio, our utilization is just 10% as of now, which probably is applicable to most of the organizations. It is being used just for mailing and the ATP. Our administrators haven't enabled anything else and aren't interested. The joint collaboration is not there, and people are not looking into that aspect. 

We are just using a product like Microsoft Teams just to make calls so that the telephone bills don't increase. We use chat for easier corporate communication and so that we don't have to type emails. However, there are many further uses of Microsoft Teams. There may be some companies, which are utilizing it a bit more. These are many products that you can integrate and make use of the investments. The monthly payment, which you are making, to buy and maintain this product can be over-utilized.

Microsoft can also start promoting what can you do more with this product. Currently, they're only telling that this product is available, but they are not specifying how you can collaborate and integrate with other products.

The software companies are taking advantage of bringing AI, which can work. I promote AI, but it should be used for convenience, not for replacing or eliminating mankind.

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

Microsoft 365 Business is helping the business very much. Office 365 is reliable, full of a lot of applications, such as Word, Excel, and so on. It is very easy. Some versions are deployed on-premises, and some are deployed on the cloud.

We have around 200 users in our company. We are also a member of a group, and we have more than 3000 users all over the group. 

The good feature with the cloud is that you can access Microsoft Office from anywhere. It's integrated with Outlook, so you can edit a file in Excel, Word, or any other application and just attach it in the mail. It makes the business easier.

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. 

I have been using this solution for five or six years. 

The stability is very good. All Office products work fine except for Excel, which hangs many times.

We did not need technical support. We are handling our problems.

For emails, we migrated from Gmail to Microsoft mail.

The initial setup was straightforward. It takes a very short time. Deployment time depends on the application, that is, whether you are deploying the whole Office or just Excel or Word.

We are deploying our products. In our group, we have more than 100 members for deploying our products. For Microsoft products, we have around 41 members.

I would, of course, recommend Microsoft for all people. Microsoft always meets your expectations. 

I would rate Microsoft 365 Business a nine out of ten. I think it's a complete application. They just need to enhance the performance of Excel.

We take care of our business tasks and communications using the full office environment.  

Teams is also a part of the Office 365 suite from Microsoft that I was actually using separately from Office before we moved to the Office 365 product.  

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.  

I have been using the complete suite for the last seven months.  

It is a mature and stable product. There are no concerns with stability.  

I have no complaints about the scalability. The entire company is using the product and we are a company with about 800 employees. Maybe some people in the production areas are not using it because it is not important to their work, but all the office people are working with this tool.  

We previously used other versions of Microsoft products. Let's say we have been using Microsoft products for the last 10 or 15 years, which is common practice for many companies. It is company policy and not something that I can influence. No one asked me my opinion. It was the organization's decision to move to 365. We are all using Microsoft tools.  

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment. We have an IT team inside our company that helps us to use the tools and do installations.  

We did not need to have any very special implementation strategy. We could just install the software to start using it. There is no deployment of hardware along with the software so the implementation time is very short.  

The Microsoft Office 365 suite is a pretty nice product. It is working fine, no real complaints. It is a sophisticated product. You have to explore on YouTube how to use some tricks and tips to work with it more efficiently.  

Overall I am satisfied with Office 365. It is a very convenient and common product — so nothing special to give advice about that most people do not already know. You really do not need any tools, any skills, or any special training to start using it.  

Of course, later on, you can learn about some tips and tricks to enhance your experience and productivity. But in general, it is very nice.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine-out-of-ten.  

I am not a technical person, I am from the sales side and more on the commercial side of things. Our company is in Mozambique and we are the main Dell EMC repair center and service provider.  

My main use case for Office 365 is really to type documents with Word, to prepare presentations with the PowerPoint, and also to do spreadsheets with Excel. The product in the suite that I use the most is Word. PowerPoint and Excel to a somewhat lesser extent. But I do use all three frequently.  

We also resell the product so we do deployments for our customers as well.  

With Office, the interface is now more user-friendly than the previous versions of Microsoft Office. The functionality and ability to work offline are also great. There are more helpful tools in the interfacer now. For example, if you are working with Excel and you are typing a formula, Office 365 gives you tips as you work if you do something wrong. It will identify what is wrong and then you can apply the corrections. Things like that make the product more intuitive and helpful. The previous version did not have that kind of help to this extent. So, the most valuable features are the ability to work offline, the ability to have tips when writing formulas, and the improved more user-friendly interface.  

I believe one thing I enjoy more about the experience of using the product is that it now the basic features that I use most frequently are easier to find, access, and manage. This helps to make my work easier and speed up productivity.  

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.  

I have been using Office 365 for about one year now.  

Office 365 is a stable product. Besides the issues with the bandwidth use where sometimes the product uses more bandwidth depending on the network, it performs well and it is very stable and very reliable.  

We have done sales and installations for SMBs (Small and Medium-sized Businesses) as well as for enterprise companies. The issues with scalability would be budget and Internet bandwidth. If the money is there it is not an issue.  

My technicians deal with Microsoft support if they have to. Mostly they will take care of issues themselves. They have a dedicated contact and a direct portal for support purposes. So that is great. If a technician needs to open a ticket for a customer, the technician can open himself and go straight to the support portal to log the tickets and carry on from there. In terms of response time, I am not exactly sure because I am not directly involved.  

Previously, I was using Microsoft on a version from 2016. So it really is not a complete switch of products as it is still the Microsoft solution. It is just a newer version.  

I do not think the installation was easy but that is because we have around a hundred users. I did not manage the installation, but I heard from the technical guys that it is generally easier than the previous versions. We signed an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. With that, we got the keys and we got the centralized management panel from where we deploy the Office on all the endpoints. So this made it easier. For the previous versions, the technical guy had to go to each user machine to make the installation through a compact disc. But with volume licensing installation is centralized and the IT manager deployed remotely to the endpoints.  

We handle the setup and the deployment in house. We have a separate team with more-or-less 30 technicians. Some of them are specifically certified on Microsoft products through the partnership that we have with Microsoft. So, depending on the infrastructure that our customer has, we can send out as many as three technicians if it is to be deployed for say 200 users. When we need to do a mailbox migration, most of them have to be migrated at the same time. In that case, we allocate two to three technicians to do it as quickly as possible. If we are talking about enterprise companies with 1000 users — depending on what the customer requires in terms of delivery time — we might allocate as many as 20 guys. It is more likely we will allocate 10 guys. It basically depends on the customer's requirements.  

The pricing for the product is a bit of a tricky question. In terms of the total cost of ownership, I can say that it is expensive. It is a fair price, but in our country or another country with economies similar to  Mozambique, the pricing structure may be a little high and prohibitive. The first issue is the volatility of the exchange rate because our currency, the Metical, is very volatile related to the dollar. The problem here is the customer has an agreement and when he realized that he wants to add some other applications or services or something else, he has the expectation of price based on what he signed on the first agreement. But when he sees the new price, it could become a lot higher than expected because of the exchange rate. It would be nice if somehow Microsoft had some flexibility with the initial agreement so that pricing would not fluctuate dramatically because of the exchange rate.  

Another thing that factors into the pricing is that the Internet connection and Internet bandwidth is still very expensive here in Mozambique. So it is not always an easy decision to make the migration to Office 365 due to these two variables.  

I recommend the Microsoft Office 365 product to clients. We are able to do proofs-of-concept with clients who are interested and carry forward from there.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate Microsoft Office 365 as eight-and-a-half.  

As a business intelligence specialist and business owner, I primarily use the standard apps in this solution. I enjoy the fact that there's a smorgasbord of additional apps that make for great productivity within the business - especially when you realize what all the apps can do for your business.

MS365 Business has offered me a robust infrastructure with the out of the box standard offering but also provided amazing apps and features to encourage growth in other areas of my business.

I like that the standard solution is easy and intuitive. It's worth taking the time to go and poke around all the other apps, though. 

There are rules of engagement that are important to know and it can be overwhelming at first if you're never been a Sysadmin. The Apps within the solution provide different business functions so you don't have to hire anyone - you can actually do most of it yourself. It's a huge cost saving for a small business and with the subscription, it's actually much cheaper than buying the products outright, as you would have had to do in the past. You can get everything you need for a reasonable price e.g. if you wanted, say, five features/ functionality you'd pay between $100 and $1000 for each, potentially spending close to $5000 once off but then next year arrives and you need to buy the next version and again you're spending precious funds. Instead, with subscription plans, you get between ~20 features/ functions. My plan, plus the add-on Apps costs my business $12.50x2 + $30 +$9.99  per month = $780 annually - the key is TODAY'S cash stays in my pocket.

You have to buy licenses for everything, but the pricing structure is very competitive. From a small business perspective, there's lots of advantages to going with 365, because not only are you getting the standard tool set to actually just run a standard business, but you're getting add-on Apps/features that open up opportunities that you might not have thought of and... the realization that you don't have to pay another entity because you can do it yourself e.g. sway and bookings

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.

I've been using the MS365 Business standard plan for two months. 

The stability of this solution is superb. No issues. Just know that when you make updates or edits in the admin panels, the change(s) may not take effect instantaneously, in some cases.

I haven't tested scalability as we are a new business, just starting out. There is only one other person working with me and I purchased two licenses even though the other person in the company doesn't yet use the product. You have to have one license per user even though each user gets to load it/ use the license on several other devices. It might be a waste but I wanted to do the right thing. It would be helpful if they provided an option for two licenses so you could legitimately have it on a second computer. 

I've bought additional licenses for other apps because my business is going to be delivering a very comprehensive business intelligence/ project management service offering. I expect to expand use and embark on several upgrade routes available to me, when the time is right.

Very responsive, thorough and professional. Just be aware that they have teams with specialities and they don't cross lines e.g. I needed help with Power BI so you have to specify that in your ticket or deal with a generalist who will not be able to help you. I learned to state the product first then state your issue.

I've used Google in business as well, and I like the ability of being able to collaborate that they offer, but Microsoft 365 actually fixed that and you are now able to collaborate in the documents e.g. Word and Excel. So I really didn't see the need to stick with Google. The only thing that Microsoft wasn't able to deliver for me was photo and video organization/editing. Even if you're not a photographic business, you do still take photos and videos for your business. I do still use Google for all my photos and images.

The intial setup was very straightforward and took me less than an hour but all the administrative elements can take longer, depending on what you choose to do. You need to configure it with all it's variables and that can take extra time. The basic setup to just start work, was super quick. If you have a powerful computer it's about the download time and then some setup time. It's the Sysadmin leg of work that was a steep learning curve for me.

Handled it by myself with great support from a very responsive MS365 Tech team.

incredible. Very lower startup cost.

For the standard plan, the cost is USD $12.50 per month, committed annually. There are often discounts offered versus month to month.

I wanted to stick with the best and only evaluated all the different price plan options. For my size and stage of business the standard option offered everything I needed, plus some.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10.