Item: Microsoft 365
Rating: 10
Author: Austin Lin

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft 365 as our standard productivity and communication application for the whole organization. We use Outlook for email and Word, Powerpoint, and Excel as needed to prepare documents for winning new business and managing existing business. We use Teams for internal and external communications. And we use Planner as our internal project/task tracking tool.

Pros and Cons

Outlook is a great email application. We have the client tool for our laptops, but use the cloud version for mobile devices.
Teams is a great live, audio and document sharing tool.
SharePoint is a great collaboration, document management tool.
MS Word, Excel, and Powerpoint allows us to document, share, and report information.
Planner is a great tool for simple small project or task tracking.

Planner definitely could have more features to compete against Asana, Monday, and Airtable
Teams could be a little more visually pleasing and have a simpler interface
Outlook client and OWA could have a more similar interface to make transitioning between the two and maintaining folders and information easier.

Most Important Features

Planner for task and project management
Teams for audio and visual sharing and communication
Outlook for email
SharePoint for document repository and collaboration
One Drive for document back up and sharing.

Return on Investment

MS 365 has had a positive ROI because it is available everywhere, all the time, and does not require any hardware, infrastructure requirements.
Also, it integrates all the core productivity tools required to run our business
It is ridiculously affordable given all the tools, applications, and functionality.
Included email support and continuous fixes and functionality release keeps everything up to date and continuously adds more value/functionality without more cost.

Alternatives Considered

Airtable and Dropbox

Basically, Planner is nowhere as good and has nowhere as much functionality as Airtable, but Planner is included with MS 365 and good enough for us with no additional cost. Dropbox is actually really good and integrates well with MS 365. We actually use both Dropbox and OneDrive, although personally, I think we could get rid of Dropbox and just use OneDrive.

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft 365 delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft 365's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft 365 live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft 365 go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft 365 again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Nitro Productivity Suite, Dropbox, McAfee Endpoint Security

Likelihood to Recommend

I really don't think there is any other solution that can beat MS 365. All the tools are integrated and maintained well at a ridiculously affordable price point. I've worked at much larger organizations (100,000) and it works well there too. Teams, SharePoint, Planner, and OneDrive integrated with the original Office Suite of Word, Excel, PPT, and Outlook is just really hard to beat. Personally, I would say impossible to beat at the price point offered by Microsoft.

Outlook for email communication.
Teams for live audio and visual communication.
Word, Excel, and PPT for internal and external documentation, reporting, and presentations.
SharePoint for internal and external document management and document collaboration.

Innovative Uses

We use Teams and Planner for daily standups.

Future Planned Uses

Probably use some of the power apps to automate some processes.

Likelihood to Renew

There's no better, affordable, easy to maintain and use productivity solution suite out there.

There is no better integrated, affordable productivity suite out there!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)