It’s easier than ever to have an email system that caters to your business without the need for installing hardware or servers. At the moment the two major contenders are Google G-Suite and Microsoft Office 365. Now choosing the right platform depends on a few factors:
• how mobile your team is
• what type of data you are working with
• what applications are your team using
When you compare the plans for Google and Microsoft, pricing is similar when you look at the services you have access to out of the box. What really needs to be considered is how you need to use the system.
While Google Apps will open files that have Microsoft format, Google has its own file formats that may require conversion for more accessible editing. The problem with working this way is that you can’t always preserve the exact formatting of Office files when you edit and save them in Google Apps.
How much of a big deal this is for you will depend on the nature of your business: if you, your team and your clients a familiar with Microsoft Office Files, then you’re not always going to be able to maintain the same formatting with Google Apps. Google Apps interface and usability, while not particularly difficult can be challenging for a less tech savvy work force to adapt to.
Applications is where things are in Microsoft’s favor, and where many organization will benefit with Office 365 over Google Apps. With many Office 365 plans you get all the full desktop versions of Office as well as the cloud-based ones.
You can install the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook etc. on your desktop machine and work offline on these applications. Despite this being the age of cloud computing, local computing power and familiarity makes this a significant benefit – files are accessed locally or from the cloud depending on the structure best suited.
Add to this most workforce’s familiarity with Office and it has another advantage. It’s fair to say that the Google apps are definitely more basic in terms of what they can do than their Microsoft desktop app equivalents.
• If you’re looking to do some advanced number crunching, Excel will beat Google Sheets;
• if you want to add some ‘Smart Art’ in a document, you’ll need to be working in Microsoft Word rather than Google Docs;
• if you need slick slide animations in a presentation, PowerPoint will do a much better job than Google Slides.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages so the aforementioned factors will play a big part in your decision and hopefully this guide will help in that.
