GIVEN the extent of development both Google Apps and Microsoft's Office 365 have gone under recently, or just the sheer volume of features each service now offers, deciding which "office cloud" might be best suited for your small business or enterprise has become an extremely daunting task, abounding with risk.
There are a number of factors to consider in order to avoid actually harming your organisation's productivity or drowning it in sunk costs and unforeseen expenditures. Furthermore, there are other trade-offs to choosing one service over the other, which go well beyond the basic set of productivity tools each offer - support licence agreements (SLAs), application support, and maybe, especially, user culture and adoption.
I'll look at the most basic office applications, productivity and document management apps here in this short article.
The applications that both Google Apps and Office 365 are most known for are their productivity suite apps that include a word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software. These applications are known as Google Docs under Google Apps, and Office Web Apps under Office 365. Both suites also include some supplementary tools to accompany these core applications that can also be said to
have been designed to promote the idea of increased office productivity. Seeing to it that probably most business users spend the majority of their day creating or collaborating upon word processor, presentation, or spreadsheet documents, this is where both Google and Microsoft have placed most of their emphasis in regards to development. For the most part, Google has focused on stripping
down what Microsoft has built upon with its Office desktop software for years, by making a simple yet intuitive interface that users of productivity software, like Office, can easily navigate, without much of a learning curve. Microsoft has taken a similar approach, but takes any learning curve completely out of the equation by simply reducing certain parts, or advanced features, of its desktop Office software.
Microsoft's desktop and cloud versions of its office software are almost a spitting image of each other, somewhat analogous to how one may purchase a car. Choosing Office Web Apps is kind of like opting for a cheaper model of the same car, but minus the leather seats, faster engine, sunroof, and other fancy add-ons.
Both productivity suites will get the job done, meaning that 99 percent of the principal work that the majority of business users do can be accomplished with either set of applications.
On document management there is more to just creating documents with productivity applications (eg word processors or spreadsheets) than just the applications themselves. There are a number of obligations you will need to undertake in order to properly manage documents, and the data or information within them, effectively. Namely, in respect to what's available on Google Apps/ Google Docs and Office 365/Office Web Apps, there's the sharing and collaboration of documents with peers, the ability to edit documents off-line just in case an internet connection is lost or unavailable, synchronisation amongst cloud and desktop derived documents, document navigation and search, document importing and exporting, and document revisions/versioning. Most business users work in teams, and not only need to share their documents with team mates, but also collaborate with them upon those documents in real-time. Both Google Apps and Office 365 have the ability to share, collaborate, or co-author documents in real-time, or in Office 365's case, pseudo real-time. The real difference between the two might be a matter of preference - where Google Docs documents have a more straightforward approach to sharing and collaboration, Office 365 puts in place a number of mechanisms to prevent two authors from editing the same data at the same time.
It wouldn't be my position to come down on either side of this "office solution fence" if for no other reason, there are too many variables and each case should be looked at on a case by case basis. However, my main reason for writing this particular article is to suggest that there are options available and the key to selecting what's best for your company or organisation is understanding your specific functionality requirements and researching the user interface and the available integration/ compatibility of both solutions for the past as well as the future.
* Trevor Bingham (trevor. bingham@itfuel.com) is business relationship manager at FUEL in Craigavon