In an article that’s almost four years old, Matt Gervais talked about five reasons Exchange shops delay Office 365 migrations. Some of the issues he raised have been addressed (re #1 – GE), and others remain problematic, although generally less so. What I found most interesting, however, was the comment section to the article. It’s hard to gauge the veracity of the commenters due to the prolific use of anonymous names, but two of commenters talked about giving up on Office 365 due to problems.
Consider (again, this is from 2012):
(AnonymousUser, 3 August 2012) “We have migrated to Office 365. Now, after two years of BPOS/Office 365, we’re migrating back to an on-premise Exchange Server. Office 365 is not flexible enough for our environment.“
(AnonymousUser, 12 September 2012) “We are actually migrating FROM O365 after three years of frustration with BPOS and O365. The service is not reliable and the tech support is horrible. Going to O365 was the worst business decision we ever made.“
In my interactions with people about taking a strategic approach to the use of Office 365 (per my key theme), they will often mention current problems they are experiencing. e.g., instability, unreliability, and poor performance of OneDrive for Business (even the new next generation client). But I haven’t yet spoken to anyone who works for a firm that has gone to Office 365 and then pulled out entirely, as the two commenters above from 4 years ago suggested.
Is this still happening? What am I not seeing?
Categories: Microsoft Office 365
Michael Sampson 
I work for a firm of 3 (me, myself and I) and have been a big fan of Office 365 since its introduction. My main use is around Word, with an occassional utilization of Powerpoint and Excel. Not a big fan of OneDrive as I prefer Dropbox, but admittedly, OneDrive comes in handy on occasion as a default drive.
Office 365 operates best and is most efficient on a SurfacePro 4.
The ability to reformat documents without hassle has been somewhat addressed in Office365 and there are third party toolkits, such as Kutools, to assist along the way. For those that remember the unique reformatting capabilities of WordPerfect 4.2 and 5,1 – well, it’s not quite the same.
I find that a must-have tool for lawyers is Grammarly, a free grammar checker for which there is currently a download for Office365 and another one for Windows.
I try really hard these days to not mentally take the experience of one commenter and extrapolate it to the entire universe. I think that comes from hearing one person say “Notes sucks” and then hearing others say “see, everyone thinks Notes sucks!”.
It seems like there could be a myriad of issues that these individuals might have… poor internal bandwidth on their network, an inadequate network connection to the MS data centers, etc.
That’s not to say that there may well be legitimate issues in the service, either for them or in general. But if it *was* as bad as they make it out to be, then I have a hard time believing that you wouldn’t be seeing widespread dissatisfaction and numerous migrations in process.