Office365 vs Google Apps?

lumencreative · 21 Jan 2015 at 14:55

I run a web design and hosting company and at present we use our hosting servers for our emails.

I am looking at other solutions that will enable us to still contact customers should any of our hosting servers go down and so have been looking using external DNS and using either Google Apps or Office365.

Google Apps will cost us £3.96 per user.
Office365 will cost us £3.72 per user (or we can pay £9.36 and get Office thrown in).

Has anyone here had a good amount of experience with either of the above?

Armageus · 21 Jan 2015 at 15:30

We use Google Apps at work for ~100 employees and have done for over 3 years now.

Big wins for us:
- No exchange servers (hardware/licensing/backup software/technical expertise when something goes wrong)
- Docs collaboration (4 people all editing same Spreadsheet at same time) with Revision History
- Ease of management
- email anywhere e.g. Phones + people working remotely (coming from exchange and blackberries - *eugh* this was a huge benefit)
- Google Vault email retention and auditing is good and reasonably priced.
- Availability - had around 3 periods of downtime since having it, 2 were less than 10 minutes, 3rd was ~3 hours (global gmail outage), but kept well informed during that period
- Telephone help and support very good

Bad:
- Trying to change user mindset/perception of Google Docs vs MS Office (most of our users do not need the majority of features that office has but insist that "google" isn't as good. The limited feature set of Google Docs is limiting for a few users, but over the last year or so Google have been ramping out updates to formatting etc.
- Online help pretty terrible

Hope this helps

jameshurrell · 21 Jan 2015 at 15:31

I've used both...

For ease of setup for end users (assuming using Outlook 2010/2013 - 2007 will work, but requires manual setup), I would tend to lean towards O365: as long as the DNS records are setup correctly for the domain (MX, SRV etc.) then you simply enter the user's email address and password into the Outlook wizard and it will do it all for you. Same with iPhones/Android. You can setup shared mailboxes, shared calendars, public folders very easily... and of course these are all integrated into Outlook without you having to do anything. It's all very simple. I have 2 clients (30 person and 10 person) on O365 (just the Exchange Online, not including Office) and they are v happy and so am I!

Google Apps as a mail system is also very good (it's basically Gmail) - but I always set this up as IMAP in mail clients and that requires more hands on - Google Sync for Outlook is supposed to make GOogle Apps like Exchange Active Sync, but it's an add-in so requires extra faffing about and so I never tried it. Calendar sharing is not easy unless you use Google Sync (unless I was doing it wrong)...

Django x2 · 21 Jan 2015 at 22:39

Big wins for us:
- No exchange servers (hardware/licensing/backup software/technical expertise when something goes wrong) - As with O365
- Docs collaboration (4 people all editing same Spreadsheet at same time) with Revision History - As with O365
- Ease of management - As with O365
- email anywhere e.g. Phones + people working remotely (coming from exchange and blackberries - *eugh* this was a huge benefit) - As with O365
- Google Vault email retention and auditing is good and reasonably priced. - As with O365
- Availability - had around 3 periods of downtime since having it, 2 were less than 10 minutes, 3rd was ~3 hours (global gmail outage), but kept well informed during that period - Not as good as O365
- Telephone help and support very good - As with O365

Plus, depending on the plan, you get 5 licences of the latest version of Office

Battery! · 21 Jan 2015 at 23:26

Office 365 is a much better product IMO, everything just works.

Caged · 21 Jan 2015 at 23:48

If you can't wean people away from Outlook then go with Office 365. If people are open to change (or you're in a position to dictate it) then seriously consider Google Apps.

I have extensive deployments of both, and it really is as 'simple' as personal preference (ha!). Office 365 is leaps and bounds ahead of the old BPOS service, but Google Apps is still better as far as uptime goes, and it's easier to admin because there are a lot less options.

The Gmail web client is much better than Outlook Web App, searches are instant, tags are much better than folders. But if all the people who are going to be using this service are used to filing in folders then it's not always an easy transition to make.

If you need to license the Office desktop applications then you might as well pay £0.80 extra per month to add email services onto it.

However, in the last four years the Office 365 offering has improved massively, whereas Google Apps had stood relatively still. Most of Google's development has been around Drive/Docs when people are screaming out for proper shared mailboxes, push mail to iPhone clients, and centralized control of Drive shares. If I was going to bet on a product that I could stick with for five years and be confident that it would develop in the right direction I'd go with 365 at the moment.

http://roadmap.office.com/en-us

Audigex · 22 Jan 2015 at 10:14

Google Apps used to be amazing, but now it's falling behind: the lack of iPhone Push email is a nuisance, Google Docs has stood still from a usability point of view. Yes, it's got more powerful within the online app... but it's still an online app, and they just don't work/integrate as well. It won't properly compete in the eyes of most office workers until it has a desktop variant.

I'd use Google Apps if you just want email: you can live without Push and it's a slightly nicer general experience for the user, IMO: plus for a similar price you get the basic Office features if you need them.

If you need any serious Office productivity, though, it's still impossible to beat Office365. I don't often praise Microsoft, but they've actually made a decent User Experience. The login system is a bit confusing (you can't login to your account from certain areas of their website, others you can but redirect you away from your control panel etc) but as long as you use the right URL, you just create the account, they start the download and away they go

lumencreative · 22 Jan 2015 at 10:24

Thanks guys. I have used gmail and outlook web app before and the one thing that constantly bugs me with outlook web app is that when you search for something, it gets so far, then it's almost as if it's saying 'can't be arsed looking anymore' so you don't get all results, however, I've not used it from an office365 account so don't know if it's different.

Ploppy2k3 · 23 Jan 2015 at 00:32

Caged said:
If you can't wean people away from Outlook then go with Office 365. If people are open to change (or you're in a position to dictate it) then seriously consider Google Apps.

I have extensive deployments of both, and it really is as 'simple' as personal preference (ha!). Office 365 is leaps and bounds ahead of the old BPOS service, but Google Apps is still better as far as uptime goes, and it's easier to admin because there are a lot less options.

The Gmail web client is much better than Outlook Web App, searches are instant, tags are much better than folders. But if all the people who are going to be using this service are used to filing in folders then it's not always an easy transition to make.

If you need to license the Office desktop applications then you might as well pay £0.80 extra per month to add email services onto it.

However, in the last four years the Office 365 offering has improved massively, whereas Google Apps had stood relatively still. Most of Google's development has been around Drive/Docs when people are screaming out for proper shared mailboxes, push mail to iPhone clients, and centralized control of Drive shares. If I was going to bet on a product that I could stick with for five years and be confident that it would develop in the right direction I'd go with 365 at the moment.

http://roadmap.office.com/en-us

+1

this is the most honest/factual answer i've seen for moving to O365.

If you are considering cloud then O365 is the way to go. Google need to step up.

lumencreative · 23 Jan 2015 at 15:11

Ploppy2k3 said:
+1

this is the most honest/factual answer i've seen for moving to O365.

If you are considering cloud then O365 is the way to go. Google need to step up.

Thanks. Office365 it is then. I've just found out as well that as a Microsoft Partner, I can sign up to ActionPack and get 5 seats of Office365 Enterprise for £310 (as well as a load of other free software with Internal Use rights). Bargain

Caged · 24 Jan 2015 at 12:37

Ask yourself if you'd ever migrate from Office 365 to Google Apps, and vice-versa. That should give you the answer as to what is better.

lumencreative · 26 Jan 2015 at 10:13

Caged said:
Ask yourself if you'd ever migrate from Office 365 to Google Apps, and vice-versa. That should give you the answer as to what is better.

I don't understand. If I'm asking for opinions of which is better, how am I going to know whether I would be migrating from Office365 to Google Apps or visa versa?

Caged · 26 Jan 2015 at 20:05

It was a more general post aimed at people who had recent experience with both systems. I think you'd struggle to find people who would go from Google Apps to Office 365.

lumencreative · 27 Jan 2015 at 09:28

Caged said:
It was a more general post aimed at people who had recent experience with both systems. I think you'd struggle to find people who would go from Google Apps to Office 365.

Thanks and sorry for misunderstanding your post.

From the research I've done into this, it seems that to use Google Apps, you need to have a completely different mindset (i.e. using cloud based apps rather than desktop apps). Whilst Microsoft offer cloud based versions of Word, Excel, etc, they are not as good as Googles versions, but then Google don't offer an offline version of their apps.

I think, for me, the deciding factor was that we need a desktop version of Office for Mac which with Office365 would normally cost £7.80 (+vat) per user. However, we can get Microsoft Action Pack for £310 (+vat) which includes 5 Office365 licenses, so we would actually only be paying £5.17 per user per month and would also have a load of other software thrown in.

Caged · 27 Jan 2015 at 19:21

Action Pack is not a way of licensing software for production use.

Swarfega · 27 Jan 2015 at 22:29

Audigex said:
Google Apps used to be amazing, but now it's falling behind: the lack of iPhone Push email is a nuisance

Dropping this is poor. I guess though they had to pay MS for using their technology.

Ultimately though I guess users can just installed GMail on their iDevice.

lumencreative said:
but then Google don't offer an offline version of their apps.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2375012?hl=en

Caged · 28 Jan 2015 at 00:49

Push Gmail works, you just have to set it up as ActiveSync instead of Gmail on the iPhone - it's nowhere near as nice as walking an end-user through Exchange configuration. If you choose to use Google Sync then you lose the ability to flag messages for some inexplicable reason.

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/139635?hl=en

Google Sync for iOS devices is still in beta.

The Google beta syndrome strikes again. I bet the code hasn't been touched since that article was written.

lumencreative · 28 Jan 2015 at 09:18

Caged said:
Action Pack is not a way of licensing software for production use.

Erm, that's exactly what it's for.

Taken from the Microsoft Action Pack website:

You earn Internal-use rights (IUR) licenses for Microsoft software and online services when you join the Microsoft Partner Network by either subscribing to Microsoft Action Pack or earning a competency. You can choose any combination of on-premises software and online services to suit your needs (run your business, train your people, develop and test, and demonstrate to your customers) and change between them at any time, just like Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers.

Caged · 28 Jan 2015 at 19:19

There's another document that says the licenses can't be used for commercial purposes or direct revenue-generating activities, which is along the lines of the old TechNet licensing.

It's about as clear as mud, in line with every other Microsoft licensing agreement.

stringsonfire · 4 Mar 2015 at 20:36

If you're going the full suite, another +1 for Office 365