What’s Missing from Office 365?

Whether your team has already moved to Office 365 or is in the consideration phase, it’s a good idea to be aware of a few of the limitations of the software suite. Office 365 excels in providing a robust, full-featured office productivity solution, but there are some Office 365 features that you may not realize you need until it’s too late.

Office 365 Backup for User Error

Sometimes your employees make mistakes. Maybe they’ve turned off auto-save and worked all day on a major presentation, only to have a power outage destroy six hours of work. Or maybe they accidentally deleted an important file. Unfortunately, Office 365 features don’t include file recovery.

If your employee accidentally deletes a proposal that a salesman needs for a major client meeting, there’s not a way within Office 365 to backup or recover that data. This can lead to confusion and difficulty when you have multiple people depending on Office 365 to manage data, documents, and presentations.

Employee Turnover Issues

When you’re using a company version of Office 365, adding new employees is quite simple. If an employee leaves your company, you can simply deactivate their Office 365 key. Unfortunately, when you do this, any files that were assigned to them disappear from your company. To maintain their files, you may get stuck paying for their seat even after they leave the company.

Ransomware Protection

In 2016, nearly 40% of companies were attacked by ransomware. Of these victims, about 30% lost money and 20% had to shut down entirely. Unfortunately, even the best antivirus programs have a hard time keeping ahead of ransomware, even when that ransomware attacks SaaS apps. If your Office 365 backup is not performed in a timely manner, it may not be possible to recover your data without paying a ransom or paying a costly data recovery service.

Version Management

Office 365 doesn’t deal very well with version management. When one user overwrites data, the new data is saved over the old data, so the old data may well be impossible to recover. Multiple versions can be saved as “v1,” “v2,” and so forth, but edits and over-writes can unintentionally destroy important data.

Support Problems

Office 365 has a robust software suite, but their support team isn’t always very fast. When you need data recovery immediately and cannot perform it internally, the Office 365 support team does not always respond quickly. Without another backup, your company may find it difficult to restore lost data in a timely manner.

The Good News

Office 365 allows for virtually seamless integration between office applications. A table can be copied from Excel and pasted into Word. Data from Access can be integrated into a Word Mail Merge document. The ability of the user to switch and combine various programs can make Office 365 an indispensable part of your workplace.

With Office 365, Microsoft has added cloud storage to their list of features. Unfortunately, the Office 365 backup features aren’t always sufficient for corporate users, who may require more frequent backups or more robust backup management tools.

See it for yourself: Office 365 and Ransomware

Want to see how an Office 365 instance can get infected with ransomware (and recover)? Watch this (but don’t try it at home).