8 reviews for Microsoft Office Online are not recommended

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Samuel P.

Indiana

96 reviews

307 helpful votes

Archiac Solutions, Constant Problems, Headaches, and No End in Sight

July 15, 2017

Office 365: A Nightmare Scenario

First and foremost, I feel it is important for me to explain that I am not in any way, shape, or form certified to deal with Microsoft Exchange or networking in general. Microsoft offers their Office 365 services to businesses and enterprises as a means of offering them Exchange hosting and other benefits for a monetary fee on a per-user basis. This service seems like a blessing for those which want the benefits that many Microsoft-happy administrators praise the corporation for, but actually hides a lot of problems behind so many promises.

Our company has been with the service for at least three years now and has experienced major hardships with managing and maintaining the service. I will dive into each of my personal complaints.

The platform itself is rather slow and non-responsive. If I need to create a new distribution group and add users to that group, it takes around 60 minutes for the group to be created. You read that correctly; 60 (sixty) minutes for the group to actually be created before I can assign any users to it.

Surely this must be a misunderstanding. Perhaps if you reload the page it will be there.

No. It wont. When I add a group, it tells me it will take around 60 minutes to add the group and to check back in around that time. Thats embarrassing.

Perhaps it is something to do with distribution groups; I am sure other changes are pretty quick.

Well, no. Making a shared mailbox or trying to create a new user can introduce new challenges to the process. I once converted a user to a shared mailbox and found for two hours that I could not access the shared mailbox. I have created a user and then waited twenty minutes to actually be able to set the account up in Outlook. While I may not be the most experienced user of Exchange services, I believe well maintained servers which have NOT been oversold would generally be significantly more responsive than this.

To provide some information; we have around 16 users on the platform and around 8 distribution groups with 4 shared mailboxes. Not a particularly taxing number of users considering I have seen friends administrate Exchange servers with hundreds of users with ease.

Well, thats the difference between self-hosted Exchange solutions and the solutions which Microsoft provides. You shouldnt expect the same quality.

I would agree with that sentiment if the price wasnt a large factor. Different plans have different costs associated with them, but none of them are particularly negligent. Our service is costing us hundreds a month compared to Googles competing service which would be significantly cheaper overall. We were promised on this solution by a company that handled Exchange servers for over 100 different companies in their area only to find that we should most likely (and most likely will) switch to Googles offerings for a better overall server.

One thing I forgot to mention; I manage multiple Office 365 accounts for different companies. This is a headache as their system for handling log-ins, while letting you log into multiple accounts, handles this in such a way that it would make Google laugh uncontrollably. Logging in and immediately being logged out is a daily occurrence. I have made it a normal practice to create a private session in my browser to log into Office 365 to do anything as even clicking on Log Out doesnt guarantee you will be logged out, and logging out doesnt guarantee that the attempt to log out wont interfere with the next account you try to log into.

Overall, Microsofts platform for business email and online service hosting is archaic at best and those trying to defend it dont understand the problem. I shouldnt need to invest thousands of hours into training and understanding a Managed Hosting Email Platform! If you have alternatives, take the alternatives. While Microsoft is taking some time to change their offerings, it does not look promising in the near future. Most of these issue have been true for at least 2 years with no fix in sight. Disappointing.