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?

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.

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

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?

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.

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.