Microsoft Exchange Online Reviews

The primary use case for Exchange Online is managing users and their mailboxes, resources, and contacts. We also use it to manage email communication within and outside the organization.

Exchange Online has helped us properly manage email communications in the company and also from employees to other users outside the company. Microsoft has deployed a lot of newer features on Exchange Online that have helped improve security, email management, email trace, mail flows, and all else. This has been very helpful for us.

The features I find the most valuable are the rules, the mail flow, the reports, and the shared mailbox. I most appreciate the shared mailbox feature.

I think Microsoft could add more security features in terms of managing spam emails, because for us as an organization, we've had to deploy that trace to complement the Exchange Online security feature.

In the next release, I would like to see more features added to the security of the solution.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online for over three years now.

I would rate the stability of this solution a 10, one a scale of one to 10, with one being not stable and 10 being very stable.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a 10, one a scale of one to 10, with one being not scalable and all and 10 being very scalable.

We plan on increasing the usage of this solution in the future. As we increase the number of our employees, we also increase the usage of Exchange Online.

We currently have about 700 users and above.

I would rate their customer service a 10, on a scale of one to 10, with one being very poor and 10 being very responsive.

Positive

I would rate the initial setup a 10, on a scale of one to 10, with one being very complex and 10 being very straightforward. It was really straightforward.

We see a whole lot of return on investment.

I would advise being aware of the organization's requirements. Also, an in-house technical person that can help in terms of managing is a necessity, because Exchange Online requires a continuous management process. The solution is not one that can just be deployed one-off and let go; it has to be continuously managed. Also, Exchange Online is quite cheap.

Overall, I would rate Microsoft Exchange Online a 10, on a scale of one to 10, with one being poor and 10 being excellent. It is a fantastic solution.

I use Microsoft Exchange Online for email.

I was talking to my dentist this morning, and I was manually entering the appointment into my calendar, and I was impressed that Exchange would actually give me the address. 

It wasn't always this way, but now it's all connected in some way. I just entered the name without checking to make sure I didn't have a typo, and my calendar was able to give me the address, it just popped up. 

When you used to write to someone, you would often begin typing their name and their email address would appear; you would simply click and you would have the correct email address. That has been working for a while, but having the location address appear was a pleasant surprise. It was amazing.

I have been having problems with Exchange. Sometimes there are issues with emails, most likely from a POP3 server, and some of the email accounts, I am not sure which one, but emails stop coming in at some point if I don't update. 

Not all of my email accounts are affected, but I have a few, and I am wondering if it is not my Gmail account on Exchange. There will be an upgrade at some point, and if I put it off, emails will stop coming in. That is a problem I have seen before, but then you do the upgrade, restart or restart the application, and usually, when you do the upgrade the problem is gone, and the emails are coming in.

Sometimes they change the interface. This has happened recently, and I'm not sure if it was something I did or something else. They don't ask for your opinion when they do this, and I am not a child anymore, and I despise it when they change the interface without consulting me. 

I am sure they had good reasons for the last interface change, but now you have the mail calendar people and tasks on a very narrow vertical bar on the left-hand side of the screen when Exchange is open full screen, and it used to be on the left side of the screen, but near the bottom, and I used to select them there, but for some reason, it has changed.

Aside from that, it's a good product. I recently added a new email account. I now have four email accounts attached to my main computer from which I receive emails on a regular basis, which is beneficial. I was able to add email accounts on my own. 

I had an issue with a delayed email account at some point. That was a long time ago, and I am not sure if the problem is still present; it could have been two or three years ago.

I couldn't delete an email account because it was identified as my primary account by the application. 

I am not sure why any of my accounts should be considered my primary account if I haven't explicitly told the app that they are. I was unsuccessful in removing it.

I needed to figure out how to change which of my accounts was the main account so that I could delete the one that the machine thought was my main account. But that was three years ago, so I'm not sure if it's still that way, but I was irritated at the time because I wasted half a day figuring out how to do this.

I contacted technical support and was surprised that Microsoft contacted me.

I had some account, login account issues on my Xbox One, and I remember being able to talk to someone in Microsoft, which was also amazing.

I used Google Hangouts briefly, but I have been using Microsoft Teams for conferencing.

I am not well versed in Google Hangouts. I have issues when it is not Teams, which is why I use it all of the time. 

When it's not Teams, I sometimes have issues with the desktop that I am using, and the microphone and speakers are not always properly configured. 

I have a camera with an integrated microphone attached to my desktop, as well as speakers connected to the desktop, and there is occasionally an incorrect selection in the inputs for the microphone. 

I am not sure if this is a problem with Google Hangout, Zoom, or something else. I know that Teams always works and that my computer always knows which option is the correct one.

At the start of COVID, when I started using these applications more, like everyone else. I recall attending a meeting where my camera was turned on but I was completely silent because I couldn't figure out how to make my microphone or select the input, and the meeting had already begun, my colleagues took over and I was there, people could see my face, but I couldn't speak.

Now that I've gotten a lot better at this, if the audio doesn't work within the first few minutes of the meeting, I can usually fix it by going into settings and selecting, trying every input until I can actually test and see that, the microphone is now picking up my voice.

Microsft Teams works great for finding the microphone on my machine, or the microphone associated with my camera, but not so well for other applications.

In addition to Microsoft Exchange Online, we use Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel Teams, and sometimes PowerPoint.

The installation was all done online. I subscribed, received a link, and installed the application. It is not an online version, but it is online in a browser. 

As it was not installed with a disc, I consider it online. I subscribed to Office 365 or 360, and then I received links to install all of the available applications. They are on my machine, but they were not purchased at a computer store.

We have an Office 360 subscription.

I'm not sure. It's somewhere between $100 and $200, but I couldn't tell you.

I didn't install it on my computer. The app is a resident on my computer, but it's a Microsoft Office subscription with automatic updates, and it's not like a version of the application that I purchased and installed on a disc on my machine.

I don't own the application because I pay an annual subscription to use it.

Previously you had to buy it at a computer store and own it until you purchased the next version. That is not the case. I pay approximately $120 or $150 per year, and as long as I pay that amount, they will do regular updates so that I always have the most recent and greatest version of the application.

It's a good product, I would rate Microsoft Exchange Online an eight out of ten.

We use Microsoft Exchange Online for email, such as sending and receiving emails. Our critical people are on the cloud and our non-critical people are on the premise.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Exchange Online is it helps the IT department with problems.

Microsoft Exchange Online can improve message delivery. There are times we receive a message that the email failed to be delivered, and there is no reason given. We sometimes have emails that are flagged as spam that are not. We cannot do anything about it because it's not managed by us, it's managed by Microsoft.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online for approximately two years.

We can experience some glitches but this could be the fault of our ISP and not the Microsoft Exchange Online. Other than this experience it has been stable.

The scalability of Microsoft Exchange Online is good as long as you are paying for the approximate usage.

We have approximately 800 people using this solution in our group. We have many types of users, such as managers and architects.

I have not used the support from Microsoft Exchange Online.

The initial setup of Microsoft Exchange Online is very simple.

The cost of Microsoft Exchange Online is approximately $4 to $36 per user. They do not give a discount which is not good. The solution is expensive if you have 800 to 1,000 users. They should give discounts when you have a lot of users.

I evaluated Microsoft Exchange on-premise, and it has a lot of glitches and needs a lot of maintenance. I chose Microsoft Exchange Online to cut this risk on our day-to-day operations for organizational communication with clients. We decided to move forward with migrating most of our users from Microsoft Office 365 or Microsoft Exchange Online, where those critical users would be not in a risk position in case anything happened on the Microsoft Exchange on-premise.

I chose to use Microsoft Exchange Online because of the disaster recovery, and clustering, and to make sure that our users are eligible for the business continuity process.

This solution is good if you have a critical business, you don't want to have any kind of down communication, you are located in multiple regions, your IT team is not large enough to maintain an Exchange on-premise servers or you don't have the large infrastructure to have clusters.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for email and calendar functionality.

It works. It does what it's supposed to do with minimal issues.

It's one of the products that Microsoft has absolutely done its very best with.

The solution is very easy to set up and quite quick to deploy.

Right off the top of my head, I can't think of anything that I would change to improve Exchange.

The pricing could always be better.

Right now, I'm writing documentation to upgrade the existing Exchange and Active Directory from 2016 to 2019.

When you migrate from on-prem to cloud, if you choose to or are forced to do the hybrid, they need to devise a way to undo the hybrid. At present, once you establish a hybrid organization between cloud and on-prem, there's no way to undo it. Fixing that would be most beneficial. At the last organization I was at and did a migration, I had 31,000 users, and my largest mailbox was 90 gigs. It took three months to complete the migration.

We had no choice but to put it into hybrid mode due to the period of time. The MX record can only exist in one place. Therefore, you can't route mail from one system to another system. All the mail had to be routed through the on-prem and then synced from the on-prem to the cloud until everything was in the cloud. Then we were able to move the MX record from being on-prem to being in the cloud. Then all mail could be received in the cloud. However, then there was no way to tear down the Exchange organization on-prem. We are still left with a server, server maintenance, licensing, OS upgrades, patching, and everything on the on-prem server. The on-prem server is literally sitting there doing nothing except filtering air in the data center, costing me power, time and cooling. Therefore, fixing that would be awesome.

I’ve used the solution throughout my career - for over 30 years.

Typically, by the time I open a ticket, and they get back to me, I've figured out how to fix it. I don't call them until I'm really stuck.

They're not very good. I have had one of their technicians call me back more than once, and I'll go, "I figured it out, I fixed it." They flat asked me, "Well, how did you fix it?" I'm like, "You're Microsoft. You figure it out." They may not have the best understanding of the system.

Neutral

I've used Exchange my entire career. My best friend is currently trying to get rid of Lotus Notes where he's at. He's been working on that for a year now, and it just doesn't seem to want to go away. I've always been with this product. I did a bunch of work with GroupWise and got GroupWise out of the environment and so forth - replacing that with Active Directory. However, that really didn't have a mail component to it.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It only took a few hours to deploy.

The pricing is always something that could be better. We always like to work towards protecting our budget.

I know what the cloud cost per user is. I don't have what the on-premises costs are.

I’m a customer. I don't have any direct relationship with Microsoft.

I’d rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It's an excellent product. It's an excellent mail system. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. If you are under 5,000 employees, I would say that Microsoft 365 is the way to go. If you're over 3,000 or 5,000 employees, I would have some serious conversations about on-prem versus cloud. Once you get over about 3,000 or 5,000 employees that are mail users, the cloud really starts to get much more expensive than on-prem.

I cannot put everything on 365 because it's obviously not as fast. We have Microsoft Exchange because we have a lot of emails. Most of our emails, about 80%, are on Exchange Server locally, and just 20% are on 365. We use Microsoft Exchange as a hybrid solution. The users who are accessing from outside and the users who are on our priority list outside of the organization are on 365. But the other people that are local are on Exchange Server.

There are more than 200 people using this solution in my organization.

It's easy to use and there is more integration. We have Dynamics and 365 as a hybrid solution. Integration with the Microsoft applications is the key for us. It has better integration with other solutions.

The ActiveSync services and the mapping services could be improved.

There are a lot of issues with security. We had one issue, a bug, with the Active Directory services.

The cost of the license could be lower, and the security features could be better.

I've been using Microsoft Exchange since 2016.

It's quite stable.

It's a core product from Microsoft, so it's quite stable because of that.

It's scalable. I chose this solution because it's easy to scale services. Services like Active Directory and ActiveSync aren't available in other solutions.

We don't have plans to increase usage right now.

Technical support is good.

Installation is easy. 

For installation, we have only two admins that can work on this solution.

The pricing is really high. It's higher compared to other services.

The license is yearly.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

Exchange Online plays a significant role in our business. It controls all our emails, so we'd be in a lot of trouble if we didn't have that. It's an essential product.

The problem with Exchange is that the attributes aren't flexible enough. I'd like to see more interaction with Office 365 and tighter integration between on-prem Exchange and Exchange Online. There's still a disconnect between mailboxes and the cloud. 

I've been using Exchange Online for the last 20 years.

Exchange Online is pretty scalable. We have about 6,000 users at our company.

I rate Microsoft support six out of 10. 

We were using a Windows NT 3.5 20 years ago and an on-prem version of Exchange.

Setting up Exchange Online is straightforward. I rate it eight out of 10 for ease of installation. The total time of deployment was a couple of days. I have eight staff looking after it.

There's a licensing cost, but it's included in our Azure pricing, so I'm not really concerned about it.

I rate Exchange Online seven out of 10. There's no alternative to it unless you want to use some Unix system, like Apache. People don't use Apache for wide-stream things like email and stuff like that. The only equivalent is a Linux-based or Unix-based solution, and who wants to do that?

The experience has been rather good. We've had nothing major happen to us. We've had no major downtimes. We haven't lost mail so far, which is good.

I enjoy not having to maintain the local infrastructure, local servers, local whatever. You use the software and don't have to worry about the details. You're not concerned with administration tasks other than managing users, which, of course, our team does on a daily basis, basically.

The pricing is okay.

The solution is stable.

The product scales well.

The user interface isn't too bad.

There were a few short outages where mail delivery was flaky.

I don't really like the response time of the web GUI for administration. All this seems a bit slow and not responsive enough. They should provide a far simpler solution for sending mail from machines as this is not really intuitive.

Due to the restrictions that Azure and Microsoft impose on sending mail, for example, if you have an Azure-deployed server that is sending out mails (for a shop system or something like that) it's not really simple. Also, it is not really scalable to use Office 365 as a relay server.

There's not really a useful backup tool that comes along with Exchange Online. You have lots and lots of storage for each user, yet you have to buy extra backup tools just to back it up with an Exchange on-premise. You could do this just with onboard tools, however, there's no such thing in cloud deployment.

We completed the migration from Lotus Notes on-premise to Microsoft Office Online or Exchange Online last year.

The stability has been good. We haven't dealt with bugs or glitches. it's pretty reliable. 

I expect the product to scale well. That is what we are paying Microsoft quite a bit of money for. They have to address scalability, reliability, and things like that. We have the service-level agreement and it's their business to do it. That's what they get the money for. 

We have about 3,500 physical users currently using Exchange. There are 1,500 more that are not interactive (for example, service accounts, group mailboxes, and accounts for machines that send mail and things like that). That makes the total number of users 3,500 persons and about 1,200-1,500 users that are not necessarily people.

I haven't had any direct contact with technical support, however, I have not heard complaints as to their services.

We used to have an on-premise deployment of Lotus Notes, however, we discontinued using this and swapped over to Microsoft Exchange Online with the help of an external consultant as there was a lot of mailbox migration to do. That was a quite lengthy process due to the fact that we had several terabytes of mail storage that had to be migrated.

We had a partner help us migrate everything over. 

The deployment times depend on a few factors. From the first start to the last migrated mailbox, for us, the deployment took over half a year. That said, actually, it wasn't that long, as we deployed in several waves taking one user group at a time and migrating them over.

Therefore, the real transfer time was much less than the seven months. In total, if you take the net time, it might have only been one month of actual migration.  However, we made a point of migrating only on weekends to keep user satisfaction high and disturbance to daily business low.

We had a partner assist us with the process.

Pricing is good. However, it's also not exactly cheap.

It's my understanding that we have a contract that runs for two or three years with an enterprise agreement backing all this up. We do not buy on a yearly basis. That would be unusual for our company to buy for such short term.

Since the project was finished, I'm no longer in an administrative role with Exchange Online. I have passed it on to other colleagues. The administration part is no longer in my hands, for which I'm quite grateful. I don't have to do the daily tasks anymore. My main job is to be the principal cloud architect for the company. I'm, to a lesser extent, concerned with daily administration tasks.

I'd recommend potential new users just go ahead and do it. It reduces the on-site administration chores by quite a bit. It's reliable enough to be used without second thoughts for business if you can handle the cost that comes with it, as Exchange or the whole Office 365 is not exactly cheap, especially when you count in the cost for security-related services that come with Office 365 if you pay for them.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It works well, just not perfectly.

We use the solution to manage calendars and the entire online and on-premises suite. It is used in large corporate banks.

One of the important features is the collaboration tool used in Office 365. The security and DLP mechanisms are also quite good.

The solution’s pricing could be better.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online as a reseller for three to four years.

The collaboration speed has some issues, but it is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight-point five out of ten.

The solution is scalable. When you reach certain volumes, the default limits on the packages essentially allow you to use the full spectrum anyway. 

The solution’s packaging makes it difficult to scale to the enterprise level without significantly upgrading the packages and negotiating higher limits on certain things, such as API calls, to accelerate data transfer.

Around 3000 users are using this platform.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

Microsoft technical support is making some improvements, but it can still be time-consuming to get an answer to a basic question. I often find it easier to troubleshoot the problem myself.

The initial setup is straightforward and takes around a week to complete.

Exchange Online deployments can be complex, especially when migrating existing data from on-premises to the cloud. Much planning and preparation is involved, and the process can be lengthy.

The product is expensive and has an annual subscription.

It's difficult to compare Exchange Online to other solutions because of its unique feature set and collaboration capabilities. For example, Google SaaS is quite limited compared to Exchange Online.

We require a full-time team of four or five engineers across different divisions to look after this solution.

I recommend this solution. You’ll find it difficult to find a better solution with all the same features at the same price point. Most other competing solutions don't have the same feature set for the price. 

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.