Microsoft 365 is still the market leader for business email and productivity software
April 28, 2021
Microsoft 365 is still the market leader for business email and productivity software
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Microsoft Office (Installed)
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)
We use it for our entire company email system, both individual users and shared accounts. We utilize instant messaging with Teams and our VOIP phone system through Teams calling. We use Sharepoint online to a limited extent and everyone uses One Drive for Business for their files.
- Email implementation. Microsoft 365 is easily the best cloud email provider and it is vastly cheaper and easier than implementing Exchange directly.
- Retention. Setting up retention and deletion policies to maintain data on the backend is remarkably easy in Microsoft 365.
- The Office 365 suite you get with licensing is still the best office productivity software around.
- Teams VOIP is missing lots of features and clunky. No functionality for shared voicemailboxes is an especially glaring omission.
- Teams still needs improvement. Administration of chat and policies is still incredibly clunky and external users who need to connect to meetings are often not a smooth process. It also can be a bit buggy with microphones and application freezing.
- Streams is terrible. You cannot administrate it in bulk in any way, external users cannot access videos and it's the mandatory way Teams meetings are recorded.
- Email administration. No brainer here, this is exchange online and it works incredibly well
- Access to the Office suite. It's still the most ubiquitous program in the business world, every user gets access to it and can install it on multiple machines with no volume licensing management. It greatly eases Office Suite management.
- Robust data retention policies. As with most companies for legal reasons, you must maintain your email/files/etc. for an extended period. With a simple Archiving license and some policies in place, this becomes a fire-and-forget issue.
- The business has been using Microsoft 365 since I joined, so I can't speak in terms of impact overall. But every single user in the company uses Microsoft 365 on a daily basis so its definitely important for company productivity.
- We saved close to $800 a month moving from our onsite phone system to implementing Teams VOIP calling as our phone system and were able to provide it to all employees which we didn't previously. It can be a little clunky as a product, but the cost savings were dramatic.
- We saved another $60 per employee by moving to Teams for our meeting software and dropping Slack and Zoom. Teams doesn't match those two feature-wise, but again cost savings makes the occasional clunky Teams issue worth it.
- Microsoft Exchange and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite)
- Significantly cheaper and easier than maintaining and licensing an Exchange server locally and basically zero labor time with upkeep outside of account management is a massive time saver.
- I've never been a big fan of G-Suite. Their email works but often is clunky to administer and license compared to Microsoft 365 and while Google productivity software like sheets has come a long way, being web-based is actually a negative for most users and the apps still are not feature comparable to the office suite. G-Suite is cheaper, but the savings aren't worth the training and support issues.
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