Microsoft Exchange Online Reviews

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 for our emails and security exchanges. 

The data prevention and protection feature is good. 

I would like them to make the solution more user-friendly. 

I have experience with Microsoft Exchange Online.

It is a very stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The scalability of the solution is also very good. There are approximately a thousand to five hundred users using the solution. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

The technical support is good so far. 

Positive

It is a cluster solution. 

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten. 

We use the product for emails, document sharing, and document preparation using Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. 

Microsoft Exchange Online is easy to use. You have a common storage where people can store documents. It also helps with version control. 

The product needs to embed AI for intelligent searches and analytics. 

I have been using the product for ten years. 

The tool comes with bugs, and I see a lot of fixes. 

Microsoft Exchange Online's deployment is easy. My company focuses on software development; setting up the tool is a breeze. 

Microsoft Exchange Online is too expensive. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Microsoft Exchange Online is a better solution for scalability purposes. The solution is helpful where you need too much infrastructure on-premises.

Microsoft Exchange Online has a really good performance. The solution is easy to access, and you can bring your own device to access from anywhere. You can still have the security controls on top of it.

The solution's performance can be improved when you are trying to access it remotely.

I have been using Microsoft Exchange Online for ten years.

Microsoft Exchange Online is a stable solution.

I rate Microsoft Exchange Online a nine out of ten for stability.

The solution’s scalability is good.

The solution’s initial setup is really easy.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

Microsoft Exchange Online is an affordable solution.

Two engineers are sufficient to deploy and maintain the solution. Microsoft Exchange Online is a cloud-based solution.

Microsoft Exchange Online is easy to set up and configure. I would definitely recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate Microsoft Exchange Online ten out of ten.

We use the solution for emailing.

50 percent of my work is accomplished via email. All of the features are beneficial, but the scheduling feature is particularly useful.

The solution is user-friendly and intuitive.

The stability of the solution on Mac products has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for 25 years.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We have ten thousand people using the solution in our organization.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Our organization pays for a corporate license to use the solution.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

Microsoft Exchange Online is simple and intuitive and I recommend the solution.