I'm an IT consultant, so I work across the board with various industries including retail, healthcare, and military government. There is really no specific target area, and right now I have a big Power BI project with a large retail store helping them with some of the Power BI reports.

For me, the most valuable features in Office 365 are the integration between all of the various apps and how you can still communicate even without third-party apps. The integration of tools such as Power Automate with SAP or Salesforce, and the connectivity coming out of Teams based on requests is my biggest takeaway; I really appreciate that Office 365 is cloud-based.

SharePoint, which is my bread and butter, integrates seamlessly with Teams to enhance project management. I started with building out SharePoint sites and having them connect with Teams to offer a user-friendly experience for those less comfortable with SharePoint. SharePoint serves as the backbone for Teams, storing all their content and capitalizing on workflow pieces; I enjoy working with Teams and SharePoint.

SharePoint acts as a glorified portal with extensive integration options not only between Office 365 apps but also third-party applications. For instance, building a Power App linked to a SharePoint list is quick and easy without needing a SQL database, resulting in tremendous cost savings as well.

Currently, I recommend that the focus remains on improving Teams since its interface still lacks certain features when compared to Skype, which has been retired. Chat-switching can be a bit challenging. While I enjoy that Teams serves small to large groups and integrates well with other Office 365 products, the user interface is where I see the most room for improvement.

On the SharePoint side, allowing more customization options would greatly enhance functionality; simpler out-of-the-box versions are fine for some scenarios, but customizing SharePoint can be super challenging with newer Office 365 versions compared to previous on-prem ones.

We are typically Microsoft consultants because people usually come to us for assistance. I find that tier one support is somewhat lacking, often focusing on what's in front of them without considering the bigger picture. If I had to rate it on a scale of one to ten, with one being the lowest and ten the highest, I would give tier one a score of six and a half, whereas I would rate tier two and three higher, around eight or nine. Sometimes tier one can even drop to threes or fours, depending on who you reach that day.

The overall rating would be seven and a half.

Positive

The return on investment with Office 365 is pretty good; it's usually positive when I look at continued usage. I've been involved with this for more than a year without it becoming stagnant, unlike some Salesforce work that has come and gone. Since my company focuses on Microsoft products, the same products keep coming up repeatedly, indicating ongoing assistance is required.

We are also shifting toward big data solutions and A.I.-generated everything, so I'm trying to redirect my focus beyond just being an Office 365 expert, considering how A.I. can improve Office 365.

The pricing for Office 365 nowadays could be better. While they have some decent offers, they're more beneficial for larger clients. For smaller companies just getting started, I believe they should offer more affordable packages, but it is what it is.

I am familiar with competitors of Office 365, such as various content management systems that often provide poor security. I find that many can be quite challenging to navigate, and systems such as Drupal are complicated and often limited to on-prem setups, even though there are cloud-based solutions. Office 365 is the most mature option, and if I were to recommend a solution, it would be the easiest for clients to get started with.

I would recommend Office 365 to others primarily for larger companies. For smaller companies, I would ensure that they have the available budget first before making a recommendation, as cost is the primary limitation.

I have not yet played with Microsoft Security Copilot or Copilot for security. I am currently dealing with Copilot as I'm working on a demo today to build my own chatbot. I want to showcase the ease of building it and discuss the associated pains and struggles while also demonstrating to the group why we should use Copilot and where we should go next.

This is just the Copilot Studio accessed via office.com under Power Apps; I did not go through GitHub. I deal a lot with Gemini and use ChatGPT frequently. I consider ChatGPT my extra voice of support for inquiries, but I trust but verify what it provides, as I have encountered incorrect information from it several times.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Office 365 an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

My most common use case involves starting my day with Office 365, specifically with Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Teams is very good, and I am trying to get used to the new user interface because it changed a bit, but I spend a lot of time in Teams and, of course, also in Outlook. I also use Microsoft Loop for structuring and organizing meetings that I have with my colleagues. It's a very handy way of keeping the information without being over-structured, and I use Loop because I prefer to note something down instead of just saying 'Oh, I will remember this' and not writing it anywhere. Rather than using a very complex, huge application that needs time to open and has a very big structure, Loop is something in between, and I find it a very useful tool that I also use on a daily basis. If I would have to pick three, they would be Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Loop.

In terms of advanced features, those are things that we usually do with Power Platform. We try to avoid building super complex Excel templates when we can use another more suitable tool or build a Power App for that.

What I appreciate in the Office 365 world is having Copilot as an assistant that can help automate many things. For example, if you need to translate something and want to ensure the translation looks professional and has a specific tone—formal, informal, friendly—then you can use Copilot for that or get a first idea and then edit the result. It helps to summarize meetings in Microsoft Teams and points out the most important key aspects discussed in the meeting.

If you have people who were not able to join the meeting, you can copy the summary and the next steps and send it to them. I find the extension with Copilot very good. One of my favorites is Copilot in Microsoft Outlook, which helps you find a meeting with people who have very busy calendars. I have a lot of appointments, and it's difficult to find a free slot. When I need help finding a slot that works for three or four colleagues with busy calendars, Copilot in Outlook helps with that.

In terms of improvements in Office 365, there might be things that need to be improved in many tools. I have some improvement suggestions for Copilot, but not the actual product itself, because I grew up with these tools. I did not know it differently. I had to use Outlook, and I learned how to do it, and now it's the default for me.

Sometimes there are simple bugs. For example, I create an appointment, and it disappears or is differently showcased in Microsoft Teams because Teams also has a meeting section as opposed to Outlook, but these are just temporary bugs. In general, these tools are very synchronized with each other.

What I would to be able to do is copy-paste meetings. If I want to send several blockers or potential meetings to the customer, I create the first one, and I want to be able to paste this first blocker on another day as blocker two, just paste and change the title. That's difficult to do. This is not something which works with Outlook yet.

I have been working with Office 365 for 7 years.

Regarding whether I consider Office 365 a cost-effective solution, I would say that if in the normal packaging, using AI—which will become the norm and the default in the near future—costs extra in Outlook, it would be nice to have those integrated in the licensing and not have to pay extra for Copilot or extra AI features. AI should be an intuitive thing and a daily job, and perhaps Microsoft should find a way to make the model still financially beneficial for them without raising the price just because we have new features and AI capabilities.

The name of the company is Orbis SE now. It's just the company change; the rest remains the same. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Office 365 an eight out of ten.

I can do Office 365 and Teams as tools that I've worked with.We use all of Office 365, not just the Windows apps, and we use all security tools, including Skype and Gmail. I happen to have my own business copy of it because it works better for me, so I'm not actually aware of all features.

Having everything in one place in Office 365, and all the apps integrate together with OneDrive, and the email management is pretty decent. It's a very well-packed platform, and it all works together.We use Power Automate in Office 365 as an example; we have a spreadsheet of all our software renewals, and Power Automate goes through and notifies us 90, 60, or 30 days before the contracts run out that we need to renew the contract.Office 365 overall is cost-effective for us. We use the Enterprise E5 version of it, which gives us our Office license, all Windows licenses, and a whole bunch of tools, including Power BI, the whole lot. It's really good value.

I think when discussing the Word, Excel, PowerPoint apps in Office 365 specifically, they possibly do not have benefits in money savings or time savings.They could bundle in Copilot as part of the Office 365 subscription. I've been hands-on testing for a month, so that will definitely make a difference.Office 365 does not already provide me with some sort of AI features or integration capabilities; you have to have a separate account for that, as it just uses a separate license to work with all the different Office versions.

I have been working with Office 365 more or less since it first came out, as far as when I started, but not since rolling out.

I don't have any sort of complaints regarding stability issues with Office 365; it's pretty stable. We occasionally get odd little things, but it's very rare.

When I contact Microsoft regarding Office 365, they are usually pretty good in terms of support and very responsive.

Positive

Deployment of Office 365 is very easy to set up and configure for my needs.Rolling out Office 365 and setting up the users is pretty straightforward. If you're doing a complicated group policy or some sort of group scenarios, then it takes a little bit longer, but you can roll out for small businesses in literally days, and it's not going to take very long.

I haven't tried working with Copilot within Office 365; it's good, but native ChatGPT and Google Gemini are better. They give slightly better results, so even though Copilot's based on ChatGPT, it's not as good.Office 365 doesn't support other AIs such as Gemini; you have to take your document and upload it to the web, as it doesn't have native integration.

I mean Microsoft Office 365.I'd give Microsoft an eight out of ten regarding support for Office 365.Overall, I would rate Office 365 a nine out of ten. I think it's essential for any business.

Splunk is very popular and many enterprises are using Splunk, and even some of our customers are using Splunk. Splunk is also very good, but we only integrated with ServiceNow so we don't know the internals of ServiceNow and pros and cons of Splunk.

SolarWinds is also very powerful. I have integrated SolarWinds with the ServiceNow infrastructure.

I know what SolarWinds does, but I am not a dedicated infrastructure resource. I'm a pure ServiceNow consultant.

SolarWinds is a very powerful tool that can scan the client network or any network and get appropriate results on whether which server is down, which component is down, or which network component is not working. In the past, we integrated SolarWinds and whenever any network component went down, our integration created an incident in ServiceNow immediately.

SolarWinds is much more than a monitoring tool. They have database offerings also, but I know it as a monitoring tool and it was very powerful.

Device monitoring and server monitoring are what we work with. That's what I know about it.

Collaboration and Teams channels are the most powerful tools that help us organize our day-to-day activities and really help us improve our business and add business value.

Collaboration is the key to address any gap either in enterprise processes or technological innovation. Microsoft Teams helps us to effectively collaborate and communicate, which helps us achieve our objectives.

We can trust Microsoft for security. All our business documents are parked on the Office 365 cloud network. We can be secure and should not worry much about security because we trust Microsoft for the security of our data.

In the context of security of our data, the first point is collaboration and coordination to optimize our business, the second is security, and the third thing is that it's a wonderful user-friendly experience.

It is already a very matured product, but there is always scope for improvement. Effective use of all products can be improvised with the use of AI, machine learning, and deep learning.

Microsoft is in the AI arena, so products can be improved in the coming time, and we can expect that.

I did that integration four or five years back and there have been already a lot of new features added. Currently, I can only talk about the older implementation.

I rarely get any issues, but occasionally when issues occurred, they were resolved early by the Office 365 internal team. We never had to reach Microsoft, but I believe they have a very powerful support team, and I don't have any doubt or concern over that.

Right now, I cannot comment on scalability issues.

The cost is justified because the product is wonderful.

Positive

Price may be a factor, but our organization is too big. I am not involved in any costing because my level is just senior architect. As our organization is big, we can afford it easily. For big organizations, cost is not an issue, but for smaller organizations or mid-size organizations, cost may be an issue. It may be costly.

Office 365 is the main tool we are using for our day-to-day operations. Office 365 provides a very good experience.

We are using many tools and apps of Office 365, primarily Teams, Outlook, and SharePoint.

Microsoft is in the AI arena, so products can be improved in the coming time.

I rate this solution nine to nine and a half out of ten.

[Answer to 'Which deployment model are you using for this solution?' from the text]

[Answer to 'If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?' from the text]

We primarily use it for document collaboration and team communications.

For example, we work with mid-sized companies in the tech sector.

The cloud storage and real-time collaboration features are incredibly valuable. The integration has definitely been beneficial to our project management.

It is beneficial that we also use Teams and SharePoint alongside Office 365 for better team collaboration.

The integration with third-party apps could be enhanced.

Streamlining the user interface would help.

I have about five years of experience with it.

The initial setup is generally straightforward.

I would rate Microsoft's technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is generally straightforward.

Usually, it involves a team of three to five people.

We usually require IT specialists and project managers during the deployment phase.

Office 365 provides a more integrated experience with a variety of productivity tools.

The seamless integration with tools such as Word and Excel sets it apart from other content collaboration platforms.

I recommend that they take advantage of the trial period to see if it fits their needs.

I would give Office 365 an eight overall.

They have replaced all my normal software with this stuff, and it is what I have to use because I do not set up my computer as IT people do it. It includes Office 365 applications such as Excel, Outlook, and Word.

They are basically identical.

I could not really say; it is just a system that delivers Excel and Outlook for me, so I had it before, and I have it now. It is just packaged differently; I do not see a difference in terms of that question.

They work sufficiently.

I suppose so; I do not think there are any alternatives. It is a monopoly.

It is a pain to use, to be honest.

Always having to log in repeatedly multiple times during the week is frustrating. Not being sure how it is connected to the cloud remains a gray zone.

I have been using it for a couple of years now.

It is stable, but something is using up a lot of RAM and CPU percentage, so it is slower than it used to be.

I just use my internal people.

I use Google sheets for personal use.

I know Office 365 Excel has functionality, but Google sheets works a bit quicker running on my machine, though my spreadsheets on that system were a bit more simple, so that might be a factor.

I use Polarion.

I have not used it much in the last year.

I have no idea about the installation as it just appears on my computer.

I am just a single user.

The organization has at least 30,000 users.

This review rates Office 365 as six out of ten.

We use Office 365 and have more than 10 users. We have migrated to Office 365 and already used that product.

We're using Office 365 for five years now since the beginning of the company, and this is five years that we are experiencing Office 365.

We have more than 10 customers using Office 365 now.

We have both SMBs and large enterprises as customers.

The most beneficial feature of Office 365 for collaboration within my team is MS Teams for communication. We also have a mailbox with 50 GB for one user and 1 TB for another. There are benefits we can use, and it is easy to manage because if there is an issue with the mail, it is handled by Microsoft.

Mail security is top-notch. They provide some of the best security in the world. We have to do a lot of things if we implement on-prem, but in the cloud, they manage everything. All we do is manage creating users and giving the permissions. That's how I see the cloud part.

They are using more security for the mail services and data security with Office 365. They are strict with the security side because mails are used for data transfer anywhere, so I think they are strictly engaged in data security for the mail services.

Office 365 has AI capability, but I'm not using that product yet. I think there's some room for improvement in the system if you utilize AI.

The support team needs to improve on the Microsoft side. That's the main issue I see.

There's a need for threat analysis from Microsoft. If those services are enabled for the customer, that would be good. Then we can monitor which users are using bad spam emails and everything from there. So, I think the threat analysis part is very needed for customers.

There's no issue with the installation of Office 365, as it is on the cloud, and that service is everything in the cloud. What we have to do is create the email account and give permission to that MX record and DNS records that we configure correctly that these are there, that MX record goes through without any issue.

It was very fast installation; it didn't require much time.

It is a scalable solution.

It is limited to the number of mail accounts. You can scale as much as you pay; for example, if you pay for 50 mailbox accounts, that is the limitation. But if you want to add 10 more, you can pay for the 10 and easily scale.

I would rate the technical support for Office 365 as nine.

Positive

Integration with Office 365 is easy, and there's no need for any expert knowledge to configure.

For the tenant, when we pay the money for Microsoft, they create the tenant within a day. That is for the transaction period. They are creating the tenant and give us the permission.

The benefit in terms of cost with Office 365 is the same, but the integration is easy, which provides a benefit for the customer.

It is a good product. If we compare it to competitor products out there, Office 365 stands out for the end customer side. Microsoft focuses on the customer GUI side, which makes it easy for customers to understand the product. I recommend it because of the GUI and human interface, which allows customers to set it up without needing technical people. That is the benefit from Microsoft's side.

We are a partner with Microsoft.

We don't interfere with the maintenance of Office 365 because Microsoft handles the maintenance side. We can see updates and maintenance messages from the portal, but when they perform updates and patches, we cannot see the services go down. So, that's the benefit.

I rate Office 365 nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Currently, I use the Office 365 environment with Microsoft products, specifically the 365. Currently, where I work, that's our business process, and I use Office 365 mainly for everything. If we want to raise and store acquisition, purchase order, purchase request, approval, or apply for a label, we use that. It's used for the full process where I work.

I appreciate the features in Office 365, especially the PowerApps and the AI, the Copilot linked to the AI. Lost the permission. I am able to populate the document. I just link it and say populate this in Word. It does that for me. Download this for me. I have it handy. More importantly, I appreciate the PowerApps. Very handy.

The integration capabilities of Office 365 are well integrated. Everything is linked. Everything is well linked. You're able to flow from your processes. Once I populate something on the process side of things, I get notification. I created about ten kappa that they need to do polykappa. We got action plan, and it notified all the possible persons that they have a copper to close and they need to go and close it. It's well integrated. It makes my work easy. It does the tracking for me.

Based on my experience, the star feature on the Outlook in Office 365 is not so good. It doesn't give first of all on the mobile app, it functions better. If you use Gmail or Yahoo Mail, you will see all of the attachments in the previous mail on the mobile app. On the laptop or PC, you won't see it. If there's a way it can be synchronized where you can see it just as it is on the mobile app, then it would make it work much better.

Improvements for Office 365 have to do with the fact that although they respond as soon as possible, we have a very large size here. We have almost twenty thousand workers here, so maybe they can attempt to use it a little bit quicker.

I have been working with Office 365 for about a year now.

The initial setup process for Office 365 is simple. It's simple to be honest.

Stability for the product is important. At the moment, they are still giving us full support for scalability. We just transitioned fully from EX twenty twelve to Office 365. Before, everyone was just using basic features, that's Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook. Now they have transitioned all of the processes based on the integration fully from EX to 365. They are still giving us full support, and the stability is actually very fine. Once we make a complaint, they resolve it within few hours or days, depending on the risk or if the fixed issues are not possible.

For the company size, we have a very large company with about almost twenty thousand staff, so Office 365 is recommended for mid-year, for large companies, and for small companies.

Tech support for Microsoft Office 365 deserves a rating of seven.

Neutral

I have used the Google one, and in Nigeria, we have Zoho too in comparison with Office 365. I've never used Amazon. Based on the ones I've used, I think Microsoft is not actually the best.

The initial setup process for Office 365 is simple. It's simple to be honest.

In terms of additional functionality, there is nothing much.

The price for Microsoft Office 365 is expensive.

I am working with Microsoft for Office 365, but I don't know what it's called. From one to ten, my final rating for Office 365 is ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

I work on a project connected to Ministry of Mining and Energetics in Serbia, primarily using Excel and Teams. I use Excel to prepare documents for data input from our associates in the field. This includes consolidation for reports but minimal analytics, using basic Excel functions like average. I also use Outlook as my email client.

The biggest benefit of Office 365 is having everything in one place with well-integrated tools. This integration leads to time savings as everything is housed in a single environment, facilitating communication, data processing, data input, and data saving. The existing functionality of Office 365 has evolved to meet increasingly complex requirements, making tasks easier and less time-consuming.

Office 365 should improve data synchronization, especially when data is accessed through the web interface and SharePoint portal. Sometimes there is a discrepancy between data accessed via the web interface and through Excel, especially with linked files. It is also essential to ensure that users know exactly where their data is and that they are working with the latest version. Also, the interface should not change too frequently, as it can be frustrating for customers who are used to a particular layout.

I have been using Office 365 in an enterprise environment for fourteen months. As a personal edition user, I have been using it for several years.

There were no significant deployment issues. Setting up Office 365 on a MacBook was straightforward. However, on Windows, it was slightly more complicated, especially concerning updates, but not overly so.

Office 365 has generally been stable for me. There have been no significant issues with stability. There was an instance related to writing Visual Basic for Applications code, which was not related to Office 365's performance but rather my coding skills.

As an end user, I have not encountered any issues with scalability. The Office 365 environment always worked well, even in a setting with hundreds of users.

The initial setup of Office 365 is easy. You can start working immediately and adjust necessary settings later. However, changes in the interface over time can be frustrating.

Office 365 is reasonably priced. For personal use, it's €10 per month for up to five users and devices, which is acceptable. For enterprise use, the costs can increase, especially with additional tools like Copilot or Power Automation.

I recommend Office 365 for personal and small business use because of its acceptable price, performance, capability, and functionality. I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

We use Intune to have control over all our Windows units, to enroll packages, update software, and manage all Windows platforms in Denmark and Norway.

I use Outlook, Excel, and Word as the primary tools within Office 365. I have used automation and flow to enable a few simple tasks to learn how it works, but I have not enabled them at a high level yet. I am also experimenting with CoPilot in collaboration with AI solutions like ChatGPT.

It is difficult for me to access actual experts quickly as Microsoft support is slow.

I have been using the Mobile Control platform from Soti since 2016.

Microsoft's technical support is slow when addressing issues directly.

Positive

Before using Soti, I was not working with any other Enterprise Mobility Management tools.

I was initially using Soti based on a perpetual license, but now I must move to a cloud solution due to changes in the licensing model. Pricing for Intune as an MDM solution is over budget.

I am considering 42Gears as a potential option because our local vendor, who understands our business well, has it available on their shelf.

I rate Office 365 a nine out of ten. It is comprehensive with its functionalities, and I am not currently missing anything. I do intend to integrate its automation features at a higher level when possible. Overall, I would give Office 365 a nine out of ten.

Other