Office365 vs Google Apps?

Other things to note/consider:

* Google support is via a reseller (direct with MS for 365)
* Googel contract via a reseller (billing is direct with MS for 365)
* You might have legal issues with Google, if your entity cares about where data resides
* One big feature / UI issue is "folders" not really being folder in Gmail but tags

Activesync is a massively better protocol for replication than IMAP + CALDAV + other
When you have mailboxes over 60Gig, not having Activesync could be an issue

For sweet single sign on, better native experience, better support experience for the same price it would be 365 by default unless you have some other Google service that is pulling you that way. (365 is harder to setup with Dirsync, ADFS etc, but worth it)
As for uptime, in 2 years only had 2 very brief outages on 365 and there have been Gmail outages in that time too. Both of which are way good enough for most people I would have thought. Food for thought I hope.
 
Caged said:
Your first two points about Google support and billing are incorrect.
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It might be old information as I looked over 2 years ago.
But sat eating the free dinner in Googles Victoria office, they looked me in the eye and told me its a channel sale, and you can't call for direct support. It was a big issue for us at the time. If thats changed, great, as it was really off-putting to us.
 
As far as I know that's never been the case. I've been dealing with Google Apps and what was then called Microsoft BPOS for 4+ years now.
 
Caged said:
As far as I know that's never been the case. I've been dealing with Google Apps and what was then called Microsoft BPOS for 4+ years now.
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Well it was the case. Just look at my email, told to me by Steve Connell of Google in October 2011 (its longer ago than I thought!)
 
I can only assume they were talking about Google Apps being sold into Education or Public Sector channels or something like that. I don't doubt you have that email, but I have Google Apps accounts that started billing in 2010 and were purchased directly from Google.

Edit: It's irrelevant anyway. Office 365 vs Google Apps is a really tough choice, and like I said earlier it massively depends on the user base. Open to changes in workflow, used to the web being the home of all their apps? Google Apps is brilliant. Users that only know Outlook and can't deal with anything but folders? Stick with Office 365.

Our install base of Office 365 to Google Apps is roughly 9-1 in favour of Office 365. If people are going to insist on using a thick application to use their email then you might as well pick the service that is well supported by the major ones and has autodiscover.
 
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Just had a Microsoft demo Office 365 this week, and was blown away by the Yammer and Skype for Business stuff. How anyone can look at that and say it is even remotely comparable to Google Apps, I don't know. Microsoft is totally rocking this space.
 
Slightly off topic, but does anyone know whether it's legal to use O365 in a retail shop environment where there are 3 PC's that everyone just jumps on and off when required or serving customer etc. Does each PC need it's own O365 subscription or can we use the same subscription for all three PCs without violating the terms of use etc?

All users use the same shared mailbox for the retail shop.
 
Technically you would need a copy of Office 2013 (either retail or volume license) per PC. If every user who was hopping on and off those machines had an Office 365 license that included desktop software then they would be covered.

What you can't do is have for example full time employees licensed with E3 or Business Premium, install Office onto the pool PCs, and then have part time staff with E1 / Business Essentials / another Office 365 plan that doesn't include desktop software just hop on and use those PCs. In reality though I don't think anyone care, and even Microsoft can't give accurate advice.
 
Time to dig this conversation up again after a couple of months of development of both platforms (or not).

Does anyone who has contact with both services get the impression that Google have given up on Google Apps? I haven't seen any new features arrive in the product for probably two years now, and I find it incredibly administrator-hostile - I think Google would rather push you to Cloud Sherpas / BetterCloud for the management tools that they couldn't be bothered to include, except that comes with a cost increase that nullifies any savings over Office 365.

Just off the top of my head here are the fairly routine operations that I can perform on Office 365 without having to leave the web UI that either need you to mess around in GAM or flat out can't be done with Google Apps:

  • Grant a user access to someone else's mailbox
  • Create a shared mailbox
  • Add external contacts to the GAL
  • Convert a user mailbox to a shared mailbox
  • Change the primary domain name on a tenant

Not to mention that Office 365 plays nicely with Outlook where Google Apps just doesn't, gives me push email on iOS, has autodiscover to set clients up, and has a much more powerful CLI in PowerShell than any Google equivalent.

Is this everyone else's opinion as well?
 
Time to bump this thread after a year since the last post.

In that time Office 365 as changed in the following ways:
  • Redesigned the SharePoint UI to make it a lot nicer to use shared sites
  • Added Groups functionality to enable informal team working without requiring adminstrator input (but still allowing administrator control)
  • Redesigned both the Office 365 admin portal as well as the Compliance and has Intune as a work-in-progress, to move common PowerShell-only features to one-click operations
  • Rebuilt the OneDrive for Business sync engine to be like the consumer version for improved reliability, and has syncing of SharePoint sites in the pipeline for this summer
  • Previewed a new Mac Skype for Business client that finally looks like it will gain feature parity with Windows
  • Launched Skype for Business Cloud PBX
  • Previewing Cloud PBX with PSTN calling in the UK
  • Rolling out Microsoft Planner to compete with Asana/Trello

As far as I can tell Google Apps has had a few tweaks to how Drive works (still no concept of centralised file storage), polished the UI up a bit, allowed the primary domain to be changed, and enabled Apps to be a SAML IdP.

Google Apps is becoming an increasingly difficult sell. Features requested years ago haven't been addressed, Groups is a stagnant product and doesn't offer shared mailbox features that are commonly requested, there's no sane way to cope with mailboxes of users that leave the org. short of continuing to pay for them. Most recently Google have announced the Recommended Partner Solutions page (https://apps.google.co.uk/partner/recommended/), which to me is official word that any features covered by the solutions highlighted on that page are not going to be replicated by Google as they don't want to upset these partners. Once you've bolted something like AODocs onto Google Apps then you're at Office 365 Business Premium pricing and you still need to buy the Office desktop apps anyway because that's what every person knows how to use and already relies on.

The only thing keeping me on Google Apps at the moment is that Microsoft still have some reliability issues and awful UI problems in certain products, but everything I've seen gives me the confidence that they are working to resolve those. Apps has stood still for the best part of five years.
 
Using google for mail is a big bad and ugly experience for me. For example, when setting an out of office under google, it changes the headers of the e-mail. If you happen to send to anyone with a half decent spam filter, this gets marked as spam.

If you send "internally" on the same domain, the message appears as spam and even if you don't have a spam filter, it will go into your spam folder.

Gmail says that it will turn the spam filtering off if you have your own external provider such as GFI. It doesn't.

Spam digest reports obviously have the word spam in it. Google deletes it without a trace, even though it says in the message logs that it has delivered it (despite no evidence in webmail or outlook)

So, yeah. Googlemail/gmail is a huge nope for me.
 
Go Google if you want absolutely everything of your life, business and possibly soul analysed, processed and resold by Alphabet Inc. And remember, don't be (caught being) evil
 
Caged said:
Time to bump this thread after a year since the last post.

In that time Office 365 as changed in the following ways:

<snip>

As far as I can tell Google Apps has had a few tweaks to how Drive works (still no concept of centralised file storage), polished the UI up a bit, allowed the primary domain to be changed, and enabled Apps to be a SAML IdP.

Google Apps is becoming an increasingly difficult sell. Features requested years ago haven't been addressed, Groups is a stagnant product and doesn't offer shared mailbox features that are commonly requested, there's no sane way to cope with mailboxes of users that leave the org. short of continuing to pay for them. Most recently Google have announced the Recommended Partner Solutions page (https://apps.google.co.uk/partner/recommended/), which to me is official word that any features covered by the solutions highlighted on that page are not going to be replicated by Google as they don't want to upset these partners. Once you've bolted something like AODocs onto Google Apps then you're at Office 365 Business Premium pricing and you still need to buy the Office desktop apps anyway because that's what every person knows how to use and already relies on.

The only thing keeping me on Google Apps at the moment is that Microsoft still have some reliability issues and awful UI problems in certain products, but everything I've seen gives me the confidence that they are working to resolve those. Apps has stood still for the best part of five years.
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Absolutely spot on. Google doesn't know what it wants, it's just a disjointed mess that happens to still make an enormous amount of money selling advertising. Everything they buy is rapidly destroyed beyond recognition, and they have zero respect for the user. A few months ago I switched my email from GMail to Office 365, and I couldn't be happier. It is clear that Microsoft is *heavily* invested in this product line, and it improves on an almost daily basis. I am well impressed with Microsoft.

As a couple of others have mentioned, I would never recommend anybody to move to GMail Apps.
 
I migrated us to Office 365 this year. It's pretty damn great.

Easy to setup
Portal.office.com works great
Collaboration has improved with OneDrive for Business and SharePoint
Comms have improved with Skype for Business
Distribution and activating Office installs is a piece of cake. In fact, the users can do that themselves if you wanted them to.
Exchange management is great if you're running a hybrid solution. Not so much if you're not.

We have a mixed Windows and OSX environment, it all works but Skype for Business hasn't been released for OSX yet, so you have to fall back to Lync 2011.
 
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