A lot of the benefits of moving to the cloud are on the back end—such as reduced support costs, simplified storage architecture, and trading up-front costs for long-term expenditures. However, there are numerous benefits to end users, and there’s less of a tradeoff in features than I’d thought. For starters, files are stored in simple web interfaces instead of in obscure shared network drives, and collaboration is easier. Working from multiple machines no longer involves emailing files to yourself. Microsoft and Google are both giving their online office suites a lot of effort—and because these services are in the cloud, there’s no reason the companies can’t update their offerings constantly.
Still, your users will have to make certain sacrifices if you decide to go with a cloud office suite. The fact is that traditional on-premises office suites (mainly Microsoft Office, but also its open-source competitors) are remarkably advanced and have tons of features. Even though the average user probably won’t use most of these advanced features, you’re likely to have users who will miss certain features if you move to web apps. And no matter how good your online office suite tools are, Internet access goes down unexpectedly sometimes. Consider these pros and cons carefully before deciding to move ahead.
Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs are the two main players in online office suites right now. These two suites provide fundamentally different experiences for end users. Office 365 is primarily meant to tie into traditional, locally installed copies of Microsoft Office—and that’s where your users are likely to do most of their work. Google Docs is all about working in browsers—you can import and export Office files, but web apps are Google’s focus. In this comparison, I look at both suites from a user’s perspective.
Price and Licensing
Microsoft and Google have very different philosophies in their licensing practices. Google is simple: Google Docs is targeted at individuals, and it’s free. You get access to all the web apps, and you can use all the Google products—Gmail for email, Google Talk for communication, and so on. For $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year, you can use Google Apps, which includes Google Docs and gives you extra storage, support, and a service level agreement (SLA).
Microsoft’s plan structure is much more complicated. At the low end, Microsoft’s kiosk worker plan (Plan K1) is $4 per month. This plan is mostly email and a place to store files for collaboration; it’s aimed at employees in an enterprise who won’t be working on machines of their own. At $16 a month, Microsoft’s enterprise plan (Plan E2) gives access to Microsoft’s web apps. The company’s $27 a month plan (Plan E4) includes licenses for Microsoft Office and enterprise voice capability. Microsoft’s structure includes numerous options, including plans aimed at small businesses.
Microsoft loses on price here—the company’s least expensive plans will work for you only if your employees have simple, specific needs. In contrast, Google’s inexpensive offering gives your users a functional cloud office suite. But you can get a lot more from Office 365 if you pay for it, and at the high end it can act as a good chunk of an enterprise-class infrastructure. These IT-level options are outside the scope of this review, but know that they’re available.
Overall Experience and File Management
Getting started with Google Apps is simple—just go to Google’s website. Using Office 365 requires you to install some software. You need a browser plug-in, and you have to install Microsoft Lync for communication. You can use Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Web Access (OWA) to connect to Office 365. Be careful if you’re using an existing Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure, though—Lync replaced Microsoft Office Communicator on my machine, and it wouldn’t connect to my organization’s Communicator infrastructure without a registry hack. Outlook 2007 also refused to connect to both Office 365 and the company’s Exchange server at the same time.
Figure 1: Google Docs home page
When you sign up for Office 365, you get a subdomain of SharePoint.com (I got zac.wiggy.sharepoint.com). Go to your site and click Member Login to obtain access. After you log in, you’re presented with your recently used documents as part of your SharePoint Team Site. Getting to your documents is easy, but doing anything else to your site will probably require administrator intervention—as someone without Microsoft Office SharePoint Server experience, I found trying to change site settings difficult.
Figure 2: Office 365 team site
Office 365’s extra SharePoint features don’t hinder users, but Google provides a simpler interface. With Google Docs, you pretty much just have the documents. Both suites make it easy to decide who has access to your documents and let you share them with outside users.
Google supports most major browsers for Docs. Office 365, however, doesn’t support Google Chrome—you can view documents, but can’t you can’t use the web apps, nor can you send a document to your local copy of Office from Chrome.