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Revenue Operations Specialist at KK AGC
Real User
Top 10
Office suite adapts well to diverse tasks but some applications need refinement

What is our primary use case?

The features of Office 365 that have significantly enhanced my workflow productivity include Excel, which is a very good product that helps assist me with my work.

There are approximately 3,000 people using Office 365 in my organization.

What is most valuable?

As a user of Office 365, I find it to be a common Office suite that we can use for documentation, spreadsheets, and presentations to other customers.

What needs improvement?

The areas of Office 365 that have room for improvement include PowerPoint, which I think needs significant improvement or should be removed. I don't know much about OneNote, and I don't find it useful. As for Access, people use it, but it's not widely adopted. Teams is in its early stages and requires substantial improvements, though it's making progress. I particularly dislike PowerPoint, though I acknowledge others may have different opinions.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have about 3 years of experience working with Office 365 specifically, but I've been using Office for approximately 20 years.

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Office 365
May 2025
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

It is deployed both on cloud and on premises.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

When rating the stability of Office 365, seven is probably reasonably good. I use Excel extensively, so sometimes it has issues because I overuse it, but based on that, it's around six or seven.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

When rating the scalability of Office 365, I would need a definition of scalability when discussing an Office suite in this case.

How are customer service and support?

I have never used technical support from Microsoft in 20-30 years.

Regarding their message board support, I think it's extremely poor. While I haven't contacted them directly, searching for solutions on the internet reveals that answers are very simple, minimal, and not very helpful.

Their actual direct contact support might be better, but I cannot verify this as I have never specifically contacted Microsoft.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

A long time ago, I was a volume seller, but now I'm just a user of Microsoft solutions.

How was the initial setup?

Regarding the initial setup of Office 365, I can't fully evaluate it because I've been using Office for so many years that Office 365 didn't seem significantly different. I use many languages and sometimes need to download packages for each language, but I experienced absolutely no issues, making it a reasonably easy solution to install.

What about the implementation team?

I did not face any challenges while integrating Office 365 with other tools.

What was our ROI?

I swapped the computer and the performance improved, but that has nothing to do with Office 365 itself.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

When I purchased Office 365 myself, it was somewhat expensive. Recently it increased in price by approximately 20 percent, and I'm not sure if this increase is justified as I don't see any explicit features that are helpful.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

There should be more options to not use PowerPoint or Access so that people who just consider using Word or Excel would have better options.

What other advice do I have?

I might be using Horizon in the next couple of months, though I'm not sure. I have extensive experience with Office 365. If organizations need it, I would recommend it, as Excel is a very good program and Word is quite a good program.

I rate Office 365 a 6 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Vice President IT Services at Allegient Defense Inc
Real User
Great vulnerability insights, offers very impressive cash savings, and offers great information security tools
Pros and Cons
  • "There are all sorts of really good tools for use on the information security side that allow us to make sure that our people are doing business and doing business right."
  • "It seems like every other week when we log into the administrative portals, it doesn't matter which one, it could be the active directory portal, it could be the exchange admin center or SharePoint admin center, it seems like Microsoft is consistently updating with new versions of the admin centers, which can be frustrating."

What is our primary use case?

We're using Microsoft Defender for endpoints.

We went that route as we did have an IT service provider, however, they were very expensive. When we did a corporate merge at the beginning of 2019, we decided that we were going to go to Office 365 and do a one-stop-shop. We didn't want to have the on-prem equipment to maintain. 

In our last solution, we were limited as to what we could do for, for example, email addresses for the entire company, which were about 80 people. It was very costly to do that. Therefore, we only had our program managers and our site leads with email addresses.

When we decided to come back over to the corporate side, we wanted to keep the same flexibility and be able to have access to Microsoft for their tech solutions or their tech assistance, depending on what we needed. It gave us that flexibility and we were able to run the company on basically two IT people rather than paying $3,000 to $4,000 a month for IT services from other vendors, such as like Ntiva or something like that.

What is most valuable?

We really like SharePoint, the Office 365 for endpoints. We're still messing around with that. We've only had that for about six weeks of play. It was good as it really started to give me insight as to what vulnerabilities I had out there on my company-owned machines. That's my most valuable tool right now due to the fact that I can not only monitor the health of the machines but also run through that same endpoint protection. I have access to cyber analysis and security testing for all my employees. I can send out test malware emails or some sort of phishing attempt emails for my entire company all in one fell swoop. I can keep a monitor on who passed, who failed, who's taken the required training, et cetera. The security compliance center that comes with that and it helps us a lot.

There are all sorts of really good tools for use on the information security side that allow us to make sure that our people are doing business and doing business right.

With our whole tenant, we had a little over a terabyte of storage just for our SharePoint. Then, each individual gets a terabyte of storage for their OneDrive. It's really nice being able to not have to worry about monitoring the storage. I mean, we do go in and we do our storage monitoring about once a quarter just to make sure that we're not approaching any limits. For example, in my account, I'm about halfway through my limit because I'm the IT guy. I've got software backups. I've got all sorts of equipment backups. It's nice to have the capability to maintain that kind of storage without having to go out and purchase it. It comes out of the box, for the company.

What needs improvement?

It seems like every other week when we log into the administrative portals, it doesn't matter which one, it could be the active directory portal, it could be the exchange admin center or SharePoint admin center, it seems like Microsoft is consistently updating with new versions of the admin centers, which can be frustrating.

This is due to the fact that, if you haven't been on in a while, sometimes it takes a good hour or two to reorient yourself -especially when you're trying to find a setting. We went through an assessment about four months ago and I had the hardest time finding certain settings in my baselines. Just being able to demonstrate something as simple as an audit log, when they move things around, can be challenging. It seems like at least once or twice a month. It gets a little confusing.

On the endpoint protection side, they've done a merge with both our security center and their compliance center. You can do multiple things from doing the same thing, however, for multiple admin sites. You get used to like one and then it takes you to another. It gets a little cumbersome or confusing as the outlays are different, the menus are a little bit different. That's one of my biggest gripes about it.

Sometimes, if we have a user that is doing some work from home, for example, and they're not on their corporate laptop and they're on their regular laptop, or vice versa, and they have like a personal Office 365 license, they sometimes conflict with each other, which then puts the person into an authentication loop, which basically means they can't access their stuff properly. We're running into that problem, actually, with one of our users right now.

For some reason, there were three different Office products that were loaded on there. A regular Office 365, Office 365 Business, and then Office 365 Enterprise. How all three of them got on there, we're not quite sure. He can open up some of his documents normally that are stored on his machine from the OneDrive, yet, when they try to open up documents that are in SharePoint, every now and then, depending on the updates that are pushed out by Microsoft, they can't open up the documents. At that point, you kind of like have to uninstall or do an online repair of the Microsoft Office itself, and then re-install it.

Due to this issue, you're losing productivity time. This guy just happens to be our corporate recruiter. We're losing time with him being able to look at resumes and stuff like that, or look at qualifications or statements of work and stuff like that.

We've been working for about two hours and yeah, I mean, he can download the document and open it up, but he can't actually open it up while it's in SharePoint. When you don't have that, when you lose that capability, especially like when they're working on proposals and when time is of the essence, it can become a big issue. 

Sometimes when the software pushes security patches it breaks, Windows wide.

For how long have I used the solution?

We started off with the Office 365 GCC High cloud government cloud solution. We had certain types of data that warranted certain levels of protection. Once we migrated all that data over to the government, we went through a name change, and then came out of that solution and into the corporate Office 365 about this time last year. Overall, we've been working in Office 365 for about three years now, at different levels.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is quite stable. I'd rate it at 95%.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is amazing. It's very easy to expand if you need it to.

How are customer service and technical support?

The technical support is very good. They are helpful and responsive. 

How was the initial setup?

We did the setup in a phased approach, where we went out and did our research and then once the tenant was assigned to us, we went through, and built everything. As we got close to releasing, we send out a notification to all of our users saying, "Okay, effective this date, this is what the new processes are going to be." We sent them out in the documentation. However, first, we had to do the research and get everybody together.

We had done a corporate merger. We were merging two companies together. My company had one email system, while the other company had another email system. That's why we had to go through all of the procedures for migrating the other company over. We had to go through all the procedures on how to migrate their data from the Ntiva server, which had all the personal drives. We had to have all that stuff in place for the users.

We did our migration from GCC High over to the commercial side and then, once we were all set up and ready to go, we initiated cutoff dates when we needed to stop using the previous portal. 

We had spent probably about two to two and a half months setting up the backend to get Intune in place and to get all of the data properly cataloged. 

We're still in the process of getting things set up as there are new technologies that come out or changes to the admin sites. We're implementing those changes and we're going through making whatever adjustments we need to make. Now that we've got the endpoint protection and more monitoring, we're seeing how that's going.

One of the drawbacks that we found out was that when we were putting out new policies to the machines, each machine operator actually reacted a little bit differently due to the fact that we did have a couple of Windows machines and a couple of Macs that we did our testing on. Once we felt that we were good, we pushed everybody out, pushed all the settings out to the security groups that we'd set up. Things didn't go as smoothly as we'd anticipated as some machines went flawlessly and some machines were rebooting constantly as they were processing stuff. It was interrupting people during their workday. It works great in dev tests, however, as soon as you put it into production, the reactions are totally different.

Overall, it was definitely a successful migration with just a couple of challenges. 

One of the big benefits of it was that it really made us understand the system a lot better. We had some older machines. It made me realize, okay, this machine is way outdated. We need to update this machine.

We just had two people that handled the deployment process. 

What about the implementation team?

We used a reseller that helped us with the implementation and setting up the SLAs. Law They took over our entire license structure. Now, we pay them instead of Microsoft.

What was our ROI?

The ROI is basically to have the peace of mind and the service level agreements in place on the security side, on the infrastructure side, from Microsoft and to know that they're doing their due diligence to make sure that all of the data is protected. They're very good about sending out notifications when they have issues going on, depending on what the suite is. If it's the entire Microsoft 365 suite or if it's SharePoint, if it's Exchange, if it's Intune and stuff like that, they're very good about letting us know. That way, I can evaluate it and still let my teams know when there's a problem. Then, they know to wait it out rather than barrage us with phone calls and, "Hey, I can't do this. I can't do that."

The ease of access, basically, to have almost everything in a one-stop shop, is definitely a good return on the investment as well. Not having to have the on-prem servers, not having to worry about making sure my servers are up to date or my certificates are all up to date and purchased is a great ROI. It's all kind of built-in. 

I also have the flexibility to expand services through Azure to do certain things. For example, if I wanted to set up a firewall, I can go in, quickly provision a firewall, and get it configured. That allows my company to be more secure. That saves me and the company time from having to go out and purchase equipment. It's all there right in the infrastructure stack.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We're a hybrid between Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Basic, depending on where a person stands in the company. Our headquarters staff is all Business Premium, while the rest of our staff members who work on government sites are set up for Business Basic because we're just providing them with email services. The headquarters staff members who have a laptop issued out to them have a Premium license. And we have Defender for Endpoint specifically for our corporate-owned devices.

If we want to expand certain capabilities, we do have to purchase some additional licensing. When we first started on the commercial side, we went directly to Microsoft and we had full control over all of our licensing. Then, when we got into certain things, like the endpoint protection license, we had to go through a third-party reseller for that. They, in turn, had to take over our whole licensing structure. We just did that last month, however, it's nice due to the fact that they do offer a 10% discount.

They also offer a one-stop shop, where if we, as the administrators run into some problems, we can go directly to them. They can either open a ticket with Microsoft on our behalf, or they have staff on-site that can help, so then that way I'm not at the mercy for Microsoft to give me a callback.

They also do have certain solutions where if they have to get remote into the machine, for whatever reason, we have to pay them a little bit of extra money to do that. We haven't had to do that part yet, however, it's nice to know that it's there as there are some times where it's just easier to have our employees reach out to them directly. Right now, we're still doing it on our own. That's one of the downfalls of it - that for smaller companies we have to go through a third-party vendor. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We were looking at Amazon Web Services as a viable solution. However, Office 365 at the time was the way to go. It was cheaper. It was basically a one-stop shop, whereas Amazon Web Services was a pay-as-you-go arrangement. They also didn't have the flexibility that we were looking for. Plus, the cost for the data in and data out was quite substantial when you look at the grand scheme of things. We had to not only provide a workstation for the people to work on, but we also had to create a virtual workstation for them to work on. Therefore, we would have been basically paying twice.

That was kind of what we were running into with our other service provider, Ntiva. We were paying for the virtual machines as well as the equipment for the people to do their work on. What was nice about 365 was that we could provide them a license and, with that license they would have access to whatever our tenant offered as far as collaborative solutions such as SharePoint, OneDrive, the whole Office suite, et cetera. 

What other advice do I have?

We're an Office 365 shop. We do all of our stuff through Azure.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. If they were better on the administrative side, I'd likely rate them at a perfect ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Office 365
May 2025
Learn what your peers think about Office 365. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.
852,764 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Senior Forensic Consultant Specialist at Old Mutual
Consultant
24/7 monitoring enhances threat detection and ensures security

What is our primary use case?

My cybersecurity strategy primarily involves using CrowdStrike Falcon as an EDR solution, and currently, we are using it as an EDR. We are in discussion with the CrowdStrike team about having a managed SOC integrated as well.

I am using CrowdStrike Falcon in the online industry.

What is most valuable?

The most effective feature I find for threat detection is the 24/7 managed monitoring, which is a next-gen antivirus and next-gen Endpoint Detection and Response. In Endpoint Detection and Response, the best part is 24/7, 365 continuous monitoring to the endpoint for identifying any suspicious activity.

It is a next-gen AV which does AI-based behavioral analysis to detect and take action on malware, ransomware, and other threats.

The automated response capabilities in CrowdStrike Falcon perform analysis based on the behavior of the activity. If it finds objectionable content or breaking of sitemaps, it uses an untraditional approach to block it. When suspicious activity occurs, such as detecting a file with a document extension that is self-replicating, the detection happens automatically. In cases of zero-day threats, such files are automatically put in sandbox for extraction and analysis to identify why it is classified as malware.

Falcon's integration capabilities with other tools enhance my security posture because it has a very lightweight agent, and having a unified console gives us complete visibility, including endpoints, servers, containers, and cloud workloads.

What needs improvement?

To improve CrowdStrike Falcon for the next release, I recommend that they should have a model where it works as an agentless solution. In terms of everything which agent pushes to the server or to the single console, if it could also have a feature where you can have other ports, which is SNMP or your network devices or OT devices, which you can specifically monitor, that would be great.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with CrowdStrike Falcon for more than 2 years now.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Regarding the setup, in my experience and our team's experience, it is fairly easy to install.

I would rate the setup an eight because we have a heterogeneous environment. For Windows, it is very straightforward and easy. For Linux, you need to automate it. If you have a bulk force, then you have to use some CMF or similar solution, which makes it a bit more complex, but overall it is fairly easy.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

During these 2 years with CrowdStrike Falcon, I faced challenges, as everybody knows about the CrowdStrike outage. That was one significant issue, as it brought many Windows-related services to a halt due to one bad configuration push from CrowdStrike tracks.

Regarding stability, except for the incidents mentioned, I don't see any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

For scalability, it is easy to scale this solution for my company needs, and I would rate it a nine.

More than 7,000 users are working with CrowdStrike Falcon in my company.

Currently, we are 100% covered with CrowdStrike Falcon, but as the user base increases, we will certainly increase the license.

How are customer service and support?

I have contacted CrowdStrike for support regarding the same incident, and my experience was pretty bad. There were people not knowing what was happening, how to mitigate it, or what to do. We were in a bad situation. After a couple of hours, their communication started flowing better, and things started improving.

My impression of the technical support of CrowdStrike, just for that particular instance, is less than four.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have evaluated other options before working with CrowdStrike, including Carbon Black and SentinelOne.

When comparing CrowdStrike and SentinelOne, I don't see many advantages, but because of one particular problem, we had to give away SentinelOne. Otherwise, all three products are quite comparable.

How was the initial setup?

Overall, it is a user-friendly tool.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

CrowdStrike Falcon is definitely an expensive solution.

What other advice do I have?

Since implementing CrowdStrike Falcon, I would say if it is protecting my environment, that fulfills my expectation. So far, I am happy.

For those who would to use CrowdStrike Falcon, I recommend that they need to negotiate hard on commercials because it is not an easy or affordable solution. From a commercial standpoint, they should negotiate hard. Technically, it is not a very difficult tool.

If we had not experienced that outage, I probably would have rated it ten. That incident gave it a very bad name because the support was inadequate. Many people might have decided to move out of CrowdStrike because of that incident.

My total rating for CrowdStrike Falcon is eight.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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General Assistant at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Needs technical support refinement while offering familiar and accessible facilities

What is our primary use case?

The bank gave us Office 365 to work with. I used Google for personal use, but in the bank, I exclusively used Office 365.

What is most valuable?

Office 365 has excellent facilities, it's familiar, and it's easy to comprehend when sending messages.

I recommend it for the facilities as it's familiar to users when they see it and makes it easy to find items and features that we can use.

The scalability of Office 365 is good.

What needs improvement?

I would rate Microsoft technical support as 3 or 4 out of 10. This rating is mainly because I didn't need much support since it works efficiently, though sometimes internet connectivity affects the experience.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have approximately 4 years of experience with Office 365.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The setup process for Office 365 is easy.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

For stability, I would rate it 10 out of 10.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability of Office 365 is good.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate Microsoft technical support as 3 or 4 out of 10. This rating is mainly because I didn't need much support since it works efficiently, though sometimes internet connectivity affects the experience.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The setup process for Office 365 is easy.

What other advice do I have?

For stability, I would rate it 10 out of 10.

I would recommend Office 365 to others.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I rate Office 365 as 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer1397796 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
MSP
Collaboration and communication improve with seamless integration

What is our primary use case?

I mostly work with AWS. My team is working on bespoke applications and we're deploying it on AWS Kubernetes, mostly with EKS services. That's my scope at this time.

I have been working with Office 365 for three years. I mainly use Office 365 for collaboration and communication, mostly using SharePoint, MS Teams, and email.

I'm using Office 365 for collaboration and communication. Microsoft Teams is the most useful feature of Office 365 for me.

What is most valuable?

Microsoft Teams is the most useful feature of Office 365 for me. Since we are using a cloud base, for stability, I can rate it 8, because there are some performance issues and outages I've encountered. From my experience, in my environment, we are using mostly the Microsoft Office suite, MS Word, PowerPoint, and everything.

I think there's more advantage in using Office 365 compared to Google or AWS collaboration tools if you are using Microsoft in your productivity tools, due to the seamless integration. Office 365 does support my remote and hybrid workforce collaboration needs.

What needs improvement?

Based on my experience as a user, I think we are going into full integration with the Copilot, so hopefully this will improve functionality, but I haven't used it yet. I'm expecting more from the full integration with the Copilot for more automation.

In the future, it would be great to see full integration with the Copilot.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with Office 365 for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

From my user point of view, the initial setup and deployment process for Office 365 is seamless to the users.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Since we are using a cloud base, for stability, I can rate it 8, because there are some performance issues and outages I've encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I think it's scalable, as long as you pay.

How are customer service and support?

I'm not raising support, as it will be handled by another team, not on the user side.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I currently am no longer working with SAP in the past two years, as I moved to another area already, which was about three years ago.

How was the initial setup?

From my user point of view, the initial setup and deployment process for Office 365 is seamless to the users.

What about the implementation team?

I'm not raising support, as it will be handled by another team, not on the user side.

What was our ROI?

I think Office 365 is more beneficial for medium to enterprise company sizes, while small companies may not find it as beneficial.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

For pricing, I think it's fairly priced, I would rate it 8.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I think there's more advantage in using Office 365 compared to Google or AWS collaboration tools if you are using Microsoft in your productivity tools, due to the seamless integration.

What other advice do I have?

I don't want to publish my review on the PeerSpot platform in public, as much as possible. I'm okay with providing only my feedback without any personal details.

For my final points for Office 365, I would rate it an 8.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
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Manager, Information & Cloud Systems at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 20
Experience vast integration and efficiency with streamlined tools

What is our primary use case?

Some use cases for Office 365 include using the Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as OneDrive, Teams, OneNote, SharePoint, and Exchange Online. We have moved all our file server data to SharePoint and we've been quite successful at that.

What is most valuable?

What's valuable about Office 365 is that the file formats have become a standard, such as .doc files and .docx files for Word. In Excel, you can do a lot of data analysis and manage spreadsheets, which is especially useful for finance people. With PowerPoint, we can create very visual and easy presentations, and now with Copilot, it's even easier to generate a presentation format that you can adjust to your needs.

The integrations of Teams and SharePoint have impacted our project management positively because we work a lot with external clients who need access to information in our environment. Before, using file servers to give external access was cumbersome, and with SharePoint, creating a sharing link with an expiration date makes sharing information easier and more controlled. Also, SharePoint allows us to create websites for our intranet, while Teams enables groups to share information, chat, and create meetings, and we have even moved all our telephony system to Teams, which is working very well.

What needs improvement?

I'm suggesting that Microsoft could improve the product, particularly in managing Office 365, which is not cumbersome but requires knowledge of several different portals. You need to become an expert on each product to administer everything properly, as each portal has a different format that is not unified.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have several years of experience with Office 365, almost since it existed. I think it started approximately ten years ago or eight years ago, and in the company I'm working for, we've used it extensively. I've been with the company for nine years now.

How are customer service and support?

I would rate customer service and technical support with Microsoft a seven. The support from our partner SoftwareONE is very good as they get back to me quickly and escalate to Microsoft when needed. The issue arises when I need to ask Microsoft directly for support, and I have had delays, such as with a SharePoint issue that took two weeks to resolve, and another instance where the ticket was mishandled and sent to the wrong queue, which delayed the response even further.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

By the time I arrived at the company, everything was already Microsoft, and I have worked with Microsoft products for most of my professional life. I have experience with other products, but that was back in the '90s. I used Microsoft Mail, Lotus Notes, and Novell products back then, and I'm certified with Microsoft products since the '90s, meaning that about 80% or 85% of my experience is with Microsoft products in general.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup for Office 365 was quite straightforward because we already had Word, Excel, and PowerPoint installed, and it was just a matter of flicking a switch. However, setting up SharePoint required tweaking a lot of security because it's designed for sharing information, which can be quite open and not secure by itself. So I designed a whole security system around it, and Teams' most complicated task was the telephony setup, which we got help with from consulting.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing for Office 365 is not cheap, but it's also not terribly expensive. It depends on the size of the company, and I think it's competitive and appropriate. The advantage of Microsoft is the vast amount of products that integrate seamlessly, which offers better value than competitors such as Google.

What other advice do I have?

I would absolutely recommend Office 365 mainly for its standardization, as I believe the majority of companies around the world use Office. I don't have specific statistics about that, but I can see it from my experience when contacting other companies that they typically use similar products, with some exceptions using Google Suite. I rate Office 365 a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Manager at ORNATE INFORMATICS PRIVATE LIMITED
Real User
Top 20
Implementation enhances organizational security and collaboration through versatile feature set

What is our primary use case?

Our current use cases for Office 365 include using it as our email handler as well as for MDM, and we also have offline office which is very important for doing our regular work such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and all. We get help from the E5 plan and we are using MDM for more than 50 people in our team. This is because there was an incident where a data breach occurred in our organization. After that, we decided we should implement the MDM solution to protect personally owned devices. After implementing MDM, we are now secure enough to prevent leakage of our organization data.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature or capability of Office 365 that I found is the legal hold feature, which is excellent for customers to maintain regulatory compliance. Deleting data is a common occurrence; people can delete their data from their device, and it will be moved to the recycle bin for a certain period of time. After the email is deleted, we found that if legal hold is enabled for a particular user, Microsoft offers unlimited archival, meaning any email that comes to that email ID will be stored, and we can easily use the E-Discovery feature to check the emails, their history, and export them in a PST file, which is very beneficial for customers during audits.

Overall, Office 365 brings organization efficiency, as these tools are very helpful for every organization to maintain their records, organization data, compliance, and collaborations. Everything that is basically required by an organization is already taken care of in the Office 365 products.

What needs improvement?

The areas of Office 365 that need improvement include the organization sharing option in Teams, which we found to be limited. If the organization does not enable it, we cannot get the IM details in Teams. If Microsoft can make it more reliable similar to social media - for example, if I am dealing with customers and I already had a meeting with them in Teams previously, the customer account should be visible to me along with their current status, such as busy, away, or available.

It would be easier for us to communicate with our customers or colleagues because it works within the organization. I am specifically referring to cross-functional connectivity for other organizations that we work with.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Office 365 for almost two and a half years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability of this solution is very high, and I would rate it a full 10. I have been using it for the last three years and have not faced any issues during this time, leading to 100% uptime.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I would rate the scalability of this solution as nine out of ten.

How are customer service and support?

I rate the technical support for Office 365 at about four to five out of 10 maximum. The support center is in China, and making them understand our issue is a hectic challenge. Every time we log a ticket, a new agent comes, and we have to describe the problem again. It is common that when the shift changes, the new staff does not have the case history, and we have to start explaining again. Customers expect quick solutions rather than reading KB articles.

With tools such as ChatGPT allowing us to find the same KB within seconds, we question why we spend so much time waiting for responses from Microsoft support. I suggest improving regional support for India, making it easier for customers to connect. Additionally, when we log cases, the support should check known issues quickly and engage with us directly when addressing unknown issues rather than just sending us basic help articles.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Office 365 is easy. Though I don't have hands-on experience, I can share our thoughts. During implementation, it took very little time and was very easy. We did not face any issues. We found that email delivery, which was being held, got delivered after three or six hours. I would give it at least eight out of 10.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Regarding similar service providers available in the market, we used Zoho previously, and we found it to be a wonderful product. However, we are more comfortable with Microsoft's UI, which influenced our choice to move to Microsoft instead of using Zoho.

What other advice do I have?

The feature of Office 365 that has proven most beneficial for collaboration in my team is definitely Microsoft Teams. It is a commonly used platform throughout the organization, serving all our collaboration and instant messaging needs.

For the maintenance of Office 365, we only need one person.

Regarding pricing, I would give Office 365 an eight. It is pretty expensive.

The licensing is complicated because when we ask for pricing, the Microsoft team presents 10 to 15 different plans with almost the same features but different prices. It is difficult for customers to differentiate, especially since we are dealing with specific use cases. We need the application for specific purposes, and Microsoft has 20 options. Customers generally tend to choose the least costly option, resulting in missing out on crucial features and needing to upgrade through the pricing tiers again. If Microsoft can simplify the licensing, it would be easier for customers to opt for their services.

Overall, I rate Office 365 eight out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Reliance on cloud tools streamlines internal communication and email exchanges

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases for Office 365 would be to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. We use Outlook for email exchanges, Teams for internal communication purposes, so these are our predominant use cases.

Microsoft Teams is something that we prominently incorporated, and it has been found to be stable and quite user-friendly among the other project management tools and communications out there in the market.

What is most valuable?

One of the features which I predominantly use in Office 365 is the Designer option in PowerPoint, which I feel was very helpful in most cases for designing presentations, so I would say that was a good feature I would recommend.

SharePoint would have been one tool we often use, but I cannot specifically say a feature that has helped us significantly in terms of Office 365.

We have been using Microsoft for quite some time for our internal purposes, and we are predominantly relying on Microsoft tools and services for internal communications and email exchange.

We have been using Office 365 for more than a year right now. We have been using Teams and other tools provided by Office 365, and it has been a really good experience.

What needs improvement?

I do not have anything in my mind related to Office 365 that really needs improvement; whatever I have right now is meeting my needs.

With respect to Word, if we could have some kind of chat interface where I can select the text and replace it via generative text, that could be a great option.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Office 365 for more than a year right now, and it has been predominantly incorporated with good results.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

During my administration setup of Office 365, it was quite difficult to set up my card payment and related items.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I am not specifically sure about the security features of Office 365; I need to check with my IT team, but it seems to be pretty reliable right now.

How are customer service and support?

I have not interacted with any technical support, so I do not have any experience with it.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Office 365 was rated around seven out of ten in terms of complexity.

What about the implementation team?

I am not sure how much time it took to deploy Office 365 as these tasks were handled by our IT team.

What other advice do I have?

A couple of people would have used my email ID from my common email account, but I am not sure about the reason. I would need to check with my employee to see what they used it for.

I am not confident enough to say for what product we have used the solution. I would need to check with my team for more details.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate Office 365 as a 9.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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