Likelihood to Recommend Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight
Read full review Microsoft 365 is well-suited for:Small and Medium-sized Businesses (SMBs): Microsoft 365 offers a cost-effective solution for SMBs to access a suite of essential productivity tools without the need for extensive IT infrastructure. It provides a wide range of applications, allowing teams to collaborate, communicate, and manage documents efficiently.Remote Work and Collaboration: Microsoft 365's cloud-based nature makes it ideal for remote work scenarios. With tools like Microsoft Teams, employees can easily communicate, hold video conferences, and collaborate on projects in real-time, regardless of their location.Microsoft 365 may be less appropriate for:Organizations with Specific Software Requirements: Some organizations may have specialized software needs that are not met by Microsoft 365. In such cases, they may require industry-specific software or custom solutions.Limited Internet Connectivity: Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based platform, which means a stable internet connection is essential for optimal functionality. Organizations with poor internet connectivity might face challenges using the cloud-based applications effectively.
Read full review Pros Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running. Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost. Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective. Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play. Read full review keeps me extremely organized. It is so easy to link calendars, emails, and documents. keeps me well connected. It is so easy to send a quick message on teams or send an email to a group (for example, my particular team within the company). easy to use. Everything is straightforward, making it easy to find an answer to a question. There is even a search option to figure out how to do something within Microsoft. Read full review Cons More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too. It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive. Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues. Read full review Microsoft 365 really needs to work on protection part. In complex environment it is not reliable as compared to its competitors like Proofpoint. There are many instances where it fails to perform effectively. In SharePoint Online the versioning feature of the document needs to be improved by Microsoft. Sometimes when we have to roll back to the previous version it does not work as expected. In Teams messaging and app permission policies can be improved. There are some settings where we have to add a lot of things manually. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good
Read full review There are many features of Office that we cannot replicate in any other tool. Plus people know it already. It's not going away anytime soon.
Read full review Usability A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
Read full review The interface of the different tools (this suite has MANY different tools) is usually simple to use and intuitive, and you can always re-arrange and add or remove the task you use most frequently from the menus and task bars.
Each tool / product includes a lot of features that may require a more intensive learning, but usually Office 365 tools are simple to learn from scratch, adding more knowledge as you required more advanced features
Read full review Support Rating One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
Read full review Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.
Read full review Implementation Rating Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes
Read full review Everything works and I use it all the time.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Read full review Google Sheets is better for sharing and collaborative editing. Versioning of the same file is also one of
Google Sheets strong points.
Microsoft 365 is better for working with local files. It is much easier to store the file in multiple places and backup multiple versions in multiple places.
LibreOffice is free but the usage is much counter intuitive than Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is worse when it comes to UI.
Microsoft Excel's performance with larger files is much better. When opening huge files, excel loads it asynchronously and I can start working right away.
Read full review Return on Investment Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running. The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up. Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost. Read full review Positively, it has increased productivity and efficiency in creating templates and being able to systemize some of the protocols we are working on putting into place. It has been a positive as well as most individuals and companies that we associate with also use MicroSoft 365 and therefore there is no need to have formats change in our documents when they open them up using another type of program. Getting work done quickly.... One and Done!!! Read full review ScreenShots