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Comment by obituary_latte | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used Google Apps beyond a little testing, but our small shop did move to outlook.com (office365) about a year ago. Main selling points were archiving/litigation hold, included licenses for Office, and the familiarity of clients with the Microsoft name.

The experience has been as I expected it would be: quite painful. We have not gone an entire month without service disruption. There have been problems with the service getting blacklisted. Support is, well, Microsoft support -- untimely, disconnected, uncaring, and when phones are involved very difficult to understand.

Anecdotal, sure, but according to the various forum/community postings I've come across trying to resolve various issues, not uncommon.

Caveat emptor.

edit: turns out what I was talking about (office365) and what the OP is talking about (outlook.com) aren't the same thing. Apologies.

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For what it's worth, we use Google Apps for Business at my workplace and our experience has been every bit as bad as yours with Outlook.

Amusingly, our Google services were once again down this morning, making it the second disruption we've had in the month of September.

And let's not even begin to discuss the abysmal multiple account support Google has, especially surrounding their mandatory-to-join G+ nonsense.

There is no decent support. Period. Google shits on support. We all know Google has a well known disdain for support. GAE is no exception. If you cannot find help in old Google Group pages, you will not get help...

Also, here's a kicker:

Google does it's best to enforce Google+ accounts on Enterprise Accounts.

So our employees are all but forced into a PUBLIC social network for our PRIVATE accounts, and because of how much mandatory integration there is with G+, we lose a lot of Google Apps functionality without having G+ accounts. We can't even use Hangouts without a Google+ account, a requirement I found disgusting and offensive.

It sucks to hear that Office365 isn't any better because I have been nothing but let down and disgusted with Google Apps for Business.

Office 365 support has been ok to us so far (unlike partner support which is shit). Had a couple of hours here and there down but compared to the cost of self-hosting exchange, it's pretty damn good.

I'd imagine so... It would take 3, maybe 4 times my current pay before I even though about attempting to self-host exchange.

Nice to hear you've had good experience. Perhaps I just got unlucky and my experience isn't indicative of the overall performance of the service (and maybe it'll go better for me next time).

I thought that the mail hosting package that comes with Office 365 is called Exchange Online? It uses Outlook Web App for webmail access and is a totally different thing from the free Outlook.com.

Yup -- you're correct. Sorry about that. I guess I got confused because the outlook.com domain is in all of the email headers. Hadn't tried logging directly into outlook.com, but indeed it won't let me.

My work also uses office365, but I don't recall too many problems with it. There were some migration troubles, but not as bad as our previous setup.

However, we do have 500+ employees and are a large business for the country we're located in, so probably have a bit of weight when it comes to getting support.

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