Microsoft 365 The Honest Review (Nov 2021)

this time it's the turn of microsoft 365 and the honest review [Music] greetings youtubers welcome back to the channel andy malone microsoft mvp as well as a microsoft certified trainer over the past year i've been doing lots of tech videos on microsoft 365 exchange sharepoint and so on and one of the most common questions that i get is what do i really think of the products and i thought okay let's investigate that shall we and now what i thought i would do is i would give you my honest review so this is andy's honest review of everything to do with microsoft 365. but be prepared um there is an element of the good the bad and the ugly here all right so um without further ado if you've not subscribed to the channel of course please go ahead click on that subscribe button ring the bell and you won't miss out on the good stuff in the future um and as always by the way if you've got any questions comments feedback i love your questions so please pop them down below there in the comments section so let's begin so microsoft 365 originally started life as office 365. now around 11 or 12 years ago as a microsoft instructor i was one of a an original group of 12 and our job was to go and learn microsoft 365 and deliver it to the masses and back in those early days the portals were really very poor um predominantly you had to administer the product by power shell and you know powershell for the most part can be quite tricky but when you're doing absolutely everything in powershell i've got to tell you it's quite it's quite daunting to ask but the product has come on a long way and i see microsoft a little bit like a bull in a china shop sometimes you think that a product is not so good but they come at you they will keep coming at you until they get their products right so products in the past that you know didn't do so well if you remember the zoom player the microsoft zoom that was the music player i think i've still got mine actually um it's probably worth something now and on the other hand you've got products like the windows phone again you know anybody who's had any kind of experience with the windows phone you think okay it wasn't so good but microsoft do learn and the products i gotta take my hat off um the microsoft 365 has come on a really long way um however like all things microsoft the marketing teams get their claws into things and suddenly what what becomes one product then becomes lots of different products so one of the things that you've got to understand about microsoft 365 is that there are a number of different plans so obviously there's plans for students there's a home addition there's a business edition enterprise edition there's plans for non-profit for government plans and so on so again we need you need to decide on which plan is best for you now one of the big differences between traditional microsoft products where you needed to purchase the product and then you had what we call a license key and that would give you perpetual licensed access to that particular product so nowadays it doesn't work like that in fact many software vendors are going down this path and what this means is it's a subscription-based model so you pay your subscription every month and just one quick tip about that by the way when you're paying the subscription you have a choice do you want to pay monthly or do you want to pay yearly i would always recommend go with the yearly option you get a much better deal all right and other tips i would say if you are a very large organization you've got a large number of seats within the organization never pay the list price always negotiate with a sales person microsoft are like any other company they've got sales targets to me so you might want to get the best deal that you possibly can so in terms of the product offerings themselves there are different skus um that means do you want to include things like microsoft office do you want to be a have a download desktop version of microsoft office are you quite happy using the online version in the web so you know it really depends on exactly what you need and what you're looking for now there was something that i did learn recently that it's amazing how many customers who have purchased microsoft office often purchase a version um where they don't probably use half of the functionality within the version so there's lots and lots of different apps so a good tip is do you really need to to use all of that functionality so in terms of reviewing the product um when you look at the product compared with google docs which i have google docs is a com it's a completely different platform and it's a very very different platform google does um its job very well very very simple but it i don't think it has the richness that microsoft 365 has the the scalability so um you know you not only have you got the actual products themselves but you've also got the back end services so you've got products like microsoft exchange you've got sharepoint and you've got teams which is really growing um on the subject of teams i'm often asked andy which do you prefer do you prefer teams do you prefer zoom which kind of um collaboration platform do you prefer i would honestly say there is a huge competition between all of these products and being a trainer in the last year during covert i you know you kind of get a chance to play with all of these platforms personally i have to say um for meetings for trainings i actually prefer zoom i think the the quality of zoom is second to none collaboration wise however teams is it's a busy product there's an awful lot of stuff there sometimes it's confusing um and i think teams as a product they're trying to be all things to all men um so not only have you got all the collaboration stuff uh you've got all the video conferencing you've got the calling features it's a very very busy product and it's like if you take your eye off teams for five minutes um it's like the the number of updates that comes it can be quite overwhelming another thing about moving to the cloud i would say as a criticism is that remember it's a service and with a service it's constantly changing constantly evolving now if you're an old-timer out there and there are quite a few of us still and who are familiar with you know doing you know downloading a product so you buy a product like windows xp windows 7 windows 8 you buy a license key you buy a perpetual license you have that product and once a month you might download updates once a month you might or you know every few months you might get an upgrade but the fact is that it's not every day so with the cloud things are changing literally potentially weekly or monthly so the updates can be coming thick and fast and if you've joined things like the office insider again it's gonna come even faster for you but as a product i think it's very rich um it's one of my absolute favorite tools out there to use there are parts of microsoft 365 that i never use to be honest but there are there's quite a lot in there that i do use now if i was talking about administration and working with microsoft 365 from an administration perspective and for example many many tasks you have to use more than you know a couple of portals so you've got the azure active directory portal you've got the microsoft 365 portal there's a lot of crossover and the problem with the products is there's no one portal to rule them all and that's i understand that it's because microsoft are there's a lot of teams at microsoft so if you're a developer at microsoft you might work for the azure active directory team another team you might be involved with the intune team and things like that so obviously integration is always going to be an issue in the cloud now the one thing i must really add about microsoft is they really do listen to their customers certainly from personal experience anyway so products like sharepoint and exchange i think they've done a fantastic job at improving the user experience the user interface but when we talk about security there's definitely the good the bad and the ugly so the good the tools are absolutely fantastic especially when we look at the compliance center we've got the new insider risk management tool you've got communications compliance i love that you've now got the compliance center really great improvements there in terms of templates so if you're having to go through for example compliance requirements things like gdpr and iso 27001 some of these are fantastic the bad okay the bad i would say some of the security features um of course the marketing teams have got all hold of some of these features and some of these features are being sold as premium so unless you've got the enterprise mobility and security add-on unless you've got the e5 add-on you don't get like cool features like um safe attachments you don't get things like web links and things like that so um these are features that used to be in for example advanced threat protection which is now called um windows 365 defender now it's a real shame because you know they're available on certain plans but other plans you just get the basic security offerings personally i think security is so important i think it's something that all customers should get one particular one that sticks out is a feature called the customer lock box feature now typically when you call a vendor the support engineer will go into your account and he will be able to help you so with the lock box feature which is only available with the e5 and emns add-on what this does is it adds an additional layer of security on your side so the when the when you call the engineer the engineer enters the lock box system he has to then get a approval if you will from his manager but then the manager requests approval from you or from somebody in your organization and once she gets approved then of course the engineer can help you and there's just that extra layer of security and the thing is it's just in time access so just enough administration but it's delivered just in time and as soon as the engineer closes the ticket it's gone yes now i do not know why this feature shouldn't be available to all business customers and maybe it will in the future so for me that's definitely one the one in my ugly list uh in terms of microsoft security so just to conclude what do i think of microsoft 365 i love it i think the functionality is way better than many of the other offerings out there if you're a home user and you want to experience it hey you know a lot of the online features so things like word excel powerpoint you can get for free so if you sign up to a basic onedrive account you get a lot of that functionality for free there's even a free version of microsoft teams bearing in mind though all things free do come with limitations but if you want to get the real power of microsoft 365 then of course a paid subscription is the way to go um i want to just uh shout out one of my colleagues he produces a fantastic website m365maps.com this is fantastic it will show you all the different versions all the different plans for microsoft 365 and it also shows you uh what's included in each plan so there you have it just a quick update of what i truly think of microsoft 365. all right now if you've not subscribed to the channel please go ahead click on that subscribe button tell me what you really think with your comments below and i really look forward to seeing you next time all right i'm andy malone you stay safe and i'll see you soon thanks very much thanks for dropping by hope you enjoyed the video go ahead and click on the subscribe button and ring that bell and you won't miss a thing see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andy Malone MVP

Views: 555

Keywords: Microsoft 365 honest review, Microsoft 365, Office 365, Microsoft MVP, Andy Malone, Microsoft 365 Tech review

Id: F_W_lFVVrms

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021