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 an organization’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 — SLAs, application support, and maybe, especially, user culture
and adoption.
To
help lessen the apprehension with choosing Google Apps over Office 365,
or vice versa, I’ll be creating a series of posts that will go over
virtually every nook and cranny of each service. Additionally, I’ll pit
the analogous features against one another in order to describe how one
might be better suited for enterprises of small, medium and/or large
size, or just explain how one might simply outperform the other. I’ll do
this by way of a
downloadable comparison chart
(Excel format), which I’ll describe briefly below. You can also find an
attached template of the chart that you might want to use/fill-in on
your own, conducting your own research.
First, we’ll look at the most basic office applications, productivity and document management apps.
Productivity applications
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
