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Google Apps vs. MS Office 365: Your Choice

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zridling:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/google-apps-vs-office-365-your-choice/1357

Phil Wainewright aims this critique for businesses, since, if you already use a desktop version of MS Office, then Office 365 is one path to the cloud you'll consider. Wainewright skims over features and looks at the architecture -- particularly the relationship between desktop Office and the Office Web Apps in the cloud -- and holds that this isn’t really a cloud architecture. But if you're a smaller firm and can't justify implementing and supporting Sharepoint and Exchange, Office 365 might make sense. Then comes the bad news:


* Microsoft offers 11 different plans for professionals and small businesses, enterprise customers, and education. Here we go again.
* The Office Web Apps are pretty weak versions of desktop Microsoft Office. They exist mainly to permit collaboration online and storing accessible documents in the cloud.
* Microsoft would not only like you to be a desktop Office user, they would like you to upgrade to Office 10 Professional Plus, with its retail price of $499.99 -- upgrades are cheaper. Ouch.
For the $6-$24/month plans for 365 compared to Google's free (or $50/year per user for support), I don't see anyone making the switch to 365 from another platform. (Unless Microsoft pays you hundreds of thousands like they did the Univ. of Nebraska.) Meanwhile, I'll stick with good ol' desktop LibreOffice.

Renegade:
For what I do, it's MS Office or nothing. Period. Nothing else can do what MS Office does. I don't say that with joy. I'm tied to Microsoft, and am working my ass off to try and free myself so I can work on any platform I choose. Right now, that's just not possible. :(

(I work on documents with added markup that only MS Office supports -- the markup is from a third party, and not from MS Office.)

Stoic Joker:
Guest post Louis Naugès is co-founder and chief cloud evangelist of international Google Apps integrator Revevol.-top of article
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I gotta go with the bulk of the commenters there; Google apps is not that impressive ... And that guy is a shill.

zridling:
For what I do, it's MS Office or nothing. Period. Nothing else can do what MS Office does. I don't say that with joy. I'm tied to Microsoft.-Renegade (July 25, 2011, 11:36 AM)
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My wife is in the same boat. Her company programmers are truly awful (they suck at simple scripts), but now they've moved onto O-2010 and half the company is using 2003; it's total FUBAR.

I gotta go with the bulk of the commenters there; Google apps is not that impressive ... And that guy is a shill.-Stoic Joker (July 25, 2011, 11:59 AM)
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Google Apps looks good for basic files, but in practice, I've found it consistently terrible. And I'm certain that I'll wake (again) someday and find that the geniuses at Google have disabled my account without warning, locking me out.

wraith808:
Google Apps looks good for basic files, but in practice, I've found it consistently terrible. And I'm certain that I'll wake (again) someday and find that the geniuses at Google have disabled my account without warning, locking me out.
-zridling (July 26, 2011, 07:58 AM)
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OT: They locked you out before?  Did you ever find out why?  And how did you get it back?

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