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Microsoft 365

Score8.7 out of 10

7,168 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) is a Microsoft Cloud subscription service that includes Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access). The software can be installed across multiple devices and ensures that users always have the most up-to-date version of the included Office applications.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Microsoft 365.
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The reliable standard of office suites

Josh Armitage
Modern Engineering Practice Lead in Professional Services at Cognizant (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft 365 as our office suite of choice. It is the default option for any documentation, presentations or spreadsheets needed to conduct business.

We use it to connect with our teams around the world, sharing knowledge, intellectual property and reference work.

It's fundamental to our ability to operate as a consulting entity.

Pros

  • Is the default choice for most enterprises, making it easy to collaborate
  • Provides online and desktop versions
  • Makes it easy to swap between different accounts, be they internal or client

Cons

  • On mac, the desktop apps often have memory leak issues
  • Multiple editing on the same powerpoint deck can make it near impossible to use
  • The editing/review mode of word doesn't exist in powerpoint

Return on Investment

  • It's use unlocks significant revenue opportunities as we're able to pull together proposals leveraging content from around the world
  • It expedites our time to market as we're able to easily leverage other work as it's the defacto file format standard
  • The addition of GenAI functionality has done little to impact our ROI

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Workspace and Notion

Other Software Used

Notion, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft Teams

Hard to compete with the OG.

Incentivized
Giovanni JuradoView profile
Business Analyst Team Lead at Cloudpay (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Communication and office tools, like I would assume many others. Teamwork activities and knowledge management are also important. The need to create documents with Word, PPT, XLS, and be able to share them quickly for easy view or edit access, and collaborative work all around. Broadcasting through teams, news, SharePoint, and other tools effectively summarizes the use.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Permissions. They are challenging to manage when you want to get granular, as some things require erasing and starting over again. Additionally, some people or groups have permissions they shouldn't have, and root cause analysis is not always intuitive.
  • They need to pay attention to clutter and reduce it if the app's performance, such as Teams, is being harmed.
  • The tier system for services allows users to utilize some AI capabilities without requiring the most complex license.
  • Visio feels like it was forgotten when compared to lucidchart or Miro.

Return on Investment

  • Quick collaboration is a game-changer. Now getting a peer review and not losing versions is a breeze, making KM easier and more efficient.
  • Analytics with Excel for easy to mid, Power BI and Power Query for more complex. Having all these different tools and content to teach how to make the most of them enables people to focus on business value more quickly. And with the advent of LLMs, even more.
  • Broadcasting is also more efficient, as it is specific to stakeholders who are merely users or provide minimal value in the creation process, but are crucial in the deployment. Being able to integrate a dashboard with a presentation, plus a document, all in a few clicks, is very efficient.
  • It's not hard to create workflows where automations and processes can be deployed from creation to collaboration to broadcast.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Surveys and Apache OpenOffice

Other Software Used

monday.com, DaVinci Resolve, xAI Grok, ChatGPT, Python IDLE

You can do this stuff for free -- or pay to do it right.

Incentivized
Justin BeckettView profile
Creative Design Director in Marketing at Manchester United Membership & Supporters Club USA, Inc (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Skype for Business is an excellent program for communicating not only in office, but with other Office 365 users across Windows, Mac and mobile platforms.
  • Onedrive, included with a suite of products you are already buying, is a sufficient cloud-file storage program.
  • Outlook is good for organization-wide mailing lists and ease of distribution. It organizes contacts well across a large company.

Cons

  • Skype for business lacks the ability to EVER communicate with personal Skype accounts. Some of our vendors do not subscribe to Office 365 and therefore are shut out of this communication process.
  • Outlook is a bit bare-bones on email coding and html and tries to be everything to everyone, integrating calendars, schedules, and many other functions instead of just being an outstanding email program.
  • OneDrive is nothing special at the end of the day. Sharing of files across user groups is mildly less intuitive than Google Drive or Dropbox and lacks a good "backup" feature should files go missing.

Return on Investment

  • Easy to schedule conversations; keep paper trails; and generally organize tasks and meetings.
  • Can't communicate or share with vendors who do not subscribe to office 365.
  • Easy to share files, make edits and communicate with other 365 users.
  • There are free vendors out there -- but the larger the organization, the more difficult that becomes to implement consistently.

Alternatives Considered

Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive and Slack

Other Software Used

Adobe Illustrator CC, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Kronos Workforce Central

Office 365 for Windows

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This is our main business software for documents and emails. We also use sharepoint and onedrive for collaboration. I'm not sure that Office 365 actually solves any business "problems". We use it simply because we have been a Windows shop for a couple of decades, and this is the office suite that is made by the same company, so compatibility is good. We have about 100 users worldwide, in-office and remote, and we no longer allow users to save docs on their local systems, so one drive is handy for that.

Pros

  • Adding users in the admin portal
  • Email works most of the time
  • Spreadsheets

Cons

  • Uptime during business hours
  • Teams messages sometimes don't always arrive
  • Stop taking all the options away from the (Teams/Outlook/whatever) UI and calling it "a new look!" That is stupid, and your "improvements" just make my job harder.

Return on Investment

  • Negative - when your systems are flapping and losing data, I have to field a hundred calls about it, and the only answer I can give is "Microsoft outage". Time is money, so every minute I have to spend covering for you is a minute of my life I will never get back.
  • I guess online Exchange is easier to deal with than on-prem running on a physical server
  • ROI is above my pay grade

Usability

Other Software Used

ArcGIS, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

O365 Review

Verified User
Employee in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use 365 for all users with mailboxes and with different licenses

Pros

  • Outlook and Mail
  • Sharepoint

Cons

  • It would be nice if AI were included in all the Office tools included in the package, thus improving the ability to create, modify, and correct documents.

Return on Investment

  • Tools like Teams, SharePoint, and Planner enable more fluid collaboration, reducing lead times and improving operational efficiency.
  • Features such as multi-factor authentication and threat protection have reduced risks and costs associated with cybersecurity.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Google Workspace

Other Software Used

Google Workspace, LibreOffice, Apple iWork

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