Ed Bott
Office 365
Google Apps
Christopher Dawson
Best Argument: Office 365
The moderater has delivered his final verdict.
Opening Statements
Trust the most experienced
Ed Bott: Microsoft knows enterprise software. Its Exchange server will celebrate its 20th birthday next year, and during that time it has evolved impressively, knocking off some impressive competitors along the way. (Remember Lotus Notes? WordPerfect GroupWise?)
It was natural that Microsoft would move Exchange into the cloud, which they did in 2008. Office 365 is the successor to that service.
Microsoft Exchange has a big-company-only reputation. That might have been true five years ago, but not today. What impresses me most about Office 365 is how it delivers a powerful and sophisticated service in a package that scales from one-person shops all the way up to global enterprises.
Google has done a good job of scaling its free Gmail service into something that a lot of people love. But which company will I trust my business with? It’s no contest: The one with the most experience wins.
Google Apps is a no-brainer
Chris Dawson: Google Apps was designed from the ground up to support business collaboration in the cloud. From the early days of integrating Writely and XL2Web with Gmail six years ago to the modern incarnation complete with full office suite capabilities, a marketplace of integrated third-party apps, and a variety of editions to support key verticals, Google Apps has always focused on enabling people to work together better online. In fact, although Google Apps works quite well as a standalone office suite and cloud storage medium, its native sharing and simultaneous editing features for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings for a single price in a 100% SaaS environment are where it really shines.
If your business is serious about collaboration and wants the fastest, easiest, least expensive way to get employees working together without any investments in on-premise software or hardware, Google Apps is a no-brainer.
Talkback
The only reason
As for the technicalities, I use Office 2010 on all my machines, and if I need to go offline, I can simply download whatever document I'm working on, and know it has full compatibility with the offline Office suite.
Google Apps better in limited situations
But for real day-to-day work it's not even close. Microsoft's apps are far better.
Google Apps == SkyDrive
For me it's about focus
Neither.
These apps are probably fine for collaboration, but honestly - if you're not in a collaborative heavy business, you're probably fine with a regular office suite, rather than some online thing that will probably take another 30 years to catch up with the full feature set of the offline suite.
Honestly, I'm not very impressed at all with the functionality of the offline apps so far. Google docs is so far behind Microsoft Office it isn't funny, and although I haven't personally tried Office 365, I've heard it's playing catch up as well. Yet these things are somehow supposed to replace their offline equivalents? How?
For my own personal use, I'll just go the Dropbox route and sync my files between my machines. That works fine, and I don't need an internet connection to edit the files, just to sync them.
It just seems like the use cases for online documents are pretty small. Sure, they may make sense to the average tech journalist, but outside of tech journalism? Not so much.
Well that's kinda the thing
I don't get it
We are currently looking at cloud solutions to reduce cost for our organization and of course looking at Office 365 and Google. To compare the products is not fair, Office 365 is better than what I have today and 50x better then Google. However, Google is cheaper and is it good enough? I would go with Google because I can save operation costs but at what cost to my users and my company? Will my users be as productive as they are today? Not sure, but don't think so because I wasn't when tested Google. Will my legal department laugh at me when I mention I Google? Probably. Will my users be more productive with Office 365? Hard to measure but with the great features such as Lync for IM and Meetings, and new features in Office 2010 and Exchange which are included - I can't imagine not being more productive.
Be interested in hearing the debate and others opinions. I just think it's amazing on what people are willing to give up for price.
Office365 FTW
My Users Have Spoken
Horses for courses
I use Google Documents (word processor ) and Spreadsheets (Excel-equivalent) and I see the limitations vis-a-vis the MS equivalents. However, for most daily use both Google Docs are good and download pretty well into MS file formats (have not tried or Open Office). The spreadsheet is fairly advanced and improvements are made to all apps every now and then.
For true independence from a 'home' computer it is no contest -- GD wins hands down. But if this is not a requirement I can see that Office 365 has its merits.