Microsoft 365 vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

Microsoft 365 is amazing for any company. For example, when I joined a startup we only had 56 people in our US office at the time. We eventually grew to 500+ employees and Microsoft was our platform to help us do that. We loved using Slack over Teams so when I joined my second company with 1500+ employees a lot of people were not happy with Teams chats/channels. Slack will always be the elite in that area based on ease of use/UI/better UX. We also have a Slack community for customers so you can see the tradeoffs. Google is doing some amazing things with Gemini especially with AI in emails so I'd pay attention to that

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
• Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
• The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• Fix Outlook. It crashes constantly, uses way too many resources, and freezes to the point that I need to shut it down in the Task Manager.
• Excel could use an easier numbering function. I used to drag down, and it would number the cells ascending. Somewhere, it lost this function and just copied the same number down the column, which is kind of useless.
• Someone needs to create (and include) a quick and easy cheat sheet for commonly used formulas. It would be nice if a drop-down would let you choose a formula (without all the prior programming).

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

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.

Incentivized

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

It being the default office suite means it's user experience and idioms are things that everyone is generally very used to and fluent with.

The sharing is relatively simple, being directly hooked into Entra AD, and expiry being a first class concern.

It's usability decreases at scale, with multiple people simultaneously making edits can make documents unusable.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Everything works and I use it all the time.

Incentivized

Its very user-friendly, collaborative and efficient that boosts productivity using cloud tools. their security is strong and it provides data protection. There are regular updates that shields us from attackers too. It offers a wealth of learning resources, including tutorials, help articles and video guide to help users make the most of the application and personally upgrade their skills.

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

• Microsoft 365 has really been effective and cost saving option for our organization in terms of managing the mailboxes, collaboration and messaging.
• There is multiple must have features which comes all together in one package and therefore is cost effective.
• The only negative impact according to me is its inability to protect the environment or domain from external attacks effectively.

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions