Great improvement on a legend, but the new kids on the block are showing real competition.
April 12, 2017

Great improvement on a legend, but the new kids on the block are showing real competition.

Chris Cromer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Microsoft Office (Installed)

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Office 365

We use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Skype for Business for all of our administrative tasks and inter-office communication. We've been using Office for over a decade, but have just recently made the switch to Office 365. We're really enjoying the flexibility that cloud-hosted applications offer as well as the regular updates. Everyone in our office, from admin and marketing to designers and drafters, to senior project managers [use these tools]. We produce proposals and manage workloads in Word and Excel, email and schedule meetings in Outlook and Skype for Business, and present PowerPoint presentations to clients and consultants regularly.
  • Being the most used word-processing suite in the world, most people are at least slightly familiar with the user interface and its functionality.
  • Continually adding small, but useful tools through seamless updates, rather than waiting for big releases like in the past.
  • It's still lacking a lot of expected seamless functionality between products. Many times moving from one to the other can offer similar, yet slightly different experiences.
  • Continually being asked to use OneDrive is very annoying. We decided to use another cloud-storage solution and constantly clicking past links to OneDrive and disabling desktop uploaders for our office is very unfortunate.
  • "Playing nice with others" has never been something Microsoft has been known for with their Office suite. They're the biggest name in town, and therefore don't feel the need to support other formats. Google is doing this really well, where they can edit and save Office formats in addition to their own G Suite apps. It would be nice to see the compatibility both ways.
  • Gaining features such as cloud-hosted emails has had a dramatically positive impact, allowing us to reference email no matter where we are.
  • As we use more cloud-sharing features, we're running into less version conflicts and "read only" prompts when someone has a document open.
  • Overall, it's continued to make us more efficient.
We mainly chose Office 365 because it was the easiest transition from our 2007 suite and locally hosted email. There are better options available, but senior partners decided against investing the time and energy required to learn a new suite of programs. We have decided to use Citrix ShareFile as an alternative to OneDrive, which is going very well. We saw OneDrive as lacking in providing useful analytics and sharing data for files and folders stored in the cloud.
Office 365 is great if you're office is well-entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem, such as a larger company. However, there are better, and more rapidly improving solutions on the market, especially from Google. A big standout feature of Office 365 are the desktop apps. They allow people to continue to work as they have been for so long, and adopt the cloud-sharing and syncing features later on, as they wish.