Office 365 is great. It simplifies setup and management, gets infrastructure out of your datacenter, and removes the headache of patching, maintaining, and licensing your mail server. It also removes a lot of admin chores, allows you to standardize users’ applications, and much more. By using Office 365, you can reclaim a ton of time and tackle more strategic and interesting issues.

Of course, as with most good things, there is a downside, and Office 365 is no exception to the rule. We’ve been talking to customers who’ve adopted Office 365, and here’s what they’ve discovered:

  • For VDI and XenApp in particular, Outlook used with Office 365 can be an absolute performance dog, and users hate it, especially if they had a local desktop installation of Outlook prior to Office 365.
  • The free 1TB of OneDrive for Business storage every user gets with Office 365 is a fantastic benefit— if only IT could trust it and manage the user experience! With no ability to audit access, set policy on what is stored in the cloud, or with a confusing user experience most organizations are not taking advantage of that 1TB at all.
  • Due to compatibility issues in other applications, some users have a mix of Office versions from different physical and virtual desktop environments. Settings don’t roam between them and the user experience is terrible. Just awful.

We’ve been working on solutions for these issues, and we’re going to roll out white papers and videos on each solution via blog posts over the next month or two. Stay tuned!