Google for Work vs. Microsoft Office 365: A comparison of cloud tools

While Google for Work and Microsoft Office 365 offer many similar services, choosing between the two can be a significant challenge for CIOs. This comparison eases that burden.

CIOs and IT managers have many choices when it comes to cloud-based productivity tools for email, documents, calendar and file-sharing. The first two options that come to mind for most, however, are Google Apps for Work and Office 365.

The former packs all the familiarities of the Google Apps suite, including Gmail, Hangouts, Drive and Calendar, while the latter comes with the longer legacy of tried-and-true Microsoft Office apps, such as Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. The two options have unique strengths and weaknesses, and each is best-suited for specific types of businesses and users.
Google for Work vs. Microsoft Office 365: Price, simplicity and storage

Both services start at $5 per month. Microsoft requires a full-year commitment, which costs at least $60 per year, while Google's suite is available on a month-to-month basis. Google also offers a yearly discounted plan for $50 a year, plus tax.

Every Office 365 user gets at least 1TB of cloud storage, while Google's entry-level plan provides considerably less space: 300MB of online storage per user. However, Google provides unlimited storage for accounts with at least five users on its $10 per month or $120 per year (plus tax) plans.

Google also gets high marks for simplicity, because it offers two relatively straightforward plans.
Microsoft makes things a bit more confusing with six total packages — three for small and medium-size businesses and three for large enterprises — that range in price from $5 to $20 per month, with a yearly commitment.

Pricing is an important determining factor, but equally important for CIOs are the feature sets, security safeguards and user experiences of both platforms. The ideal cloud-based platform is secure, stable and simple for employees to learn and use. Cost is just one of the many concerns IT managers must consider when investing in cloud-based productivity platforms.

Eric Schlissel, CEO of IT consultancy GeekTek IT Services, says his company uses Google for Work, but more often than not he recommends Office 365 to clients because they are already heavily dependent and invested in Microsoft Outlook. Many business owners are reluctant to change the way their offices work, according to Schlissel.

"We tend to recommend Google for Work to clients with a younger and more tech-savvy workforce," Schlissel says. "CIOs should look at how their employees use technology and work outwards from there."

Where Google for Work falls short
At Creative Solutions in Healthcare, a company that owns and operates assisted-living facilities, the IT department uses Google for Work while the rest of the company relies on Office 365, according to CIO Shawn Wiora.

"In many ways, Google for Work is a low-cost equivalent of Office 365, and it's a great fit for startups and small businesses that need to limit costs while achieving 'good enough' status," Wiora says. "However, the cost savings come with a number of nuances that limit its fit for enterprise customers."

Wiora says there are at least four problems with Google for Work that can add up to a major burden for businesses. He cites "shared calendar issues, an inability to transfer Excel formulas directly into Google Spreadsheets, compatibility issues and vertical-specific decisions like Google's past refusal to sign a HIPAA BAA [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act Business Associate] agreement for the healthcare industry."

In Wiora's his experience, Google's suite keeps up with Office 365 about 90 percent of the time. It's that other 10 percent that "makes Google for Work a poor substitute for medium and large enterprises that expect to simply pick up in Google where they leave off with Microsoft."

BetterCloud, a company that provides security and management services for Google Apps and Office 365, also uses both Google and Microsoft's offers, according to Tim Burke, BetterCloud's IT director.

The company primarily uses Google for Work as the sole platform for its corporate calendar and conference room reservation system, but it also provides Office 365 accounts to users who work on its Microsoft-related products.

"We've looked into many solutions for coexistence between the two platforms (especially for calendar and contacts), but there's nothing mature yet that allows Google Apps and Office 365 to 'play together' well on a single domain," Burke says.

Both platforms are enterprise class, with almost identical offerings, according to Burke, who says Google's suite is becoming more "enterprise" every day.

"Many people don't realize [Google has] been in this market for over six years at this point, and Google Apps is used by some of the largest organizations in the world," Burke says. Google's strengths also include a deeply integrated infrastructure and a simple licensing structure, he says.

Office 365 provides a continuity with legacy solutions that makes it easier to keep everyone happy with the applications they've been using for many years, or perhaps decades, but it's also evolving. "Office 365 is based on Microsoft's legacy products and is becoming more 'cloud-enabled' and easy to manage," Burke says.

Google for Work vs. Microsoft Office 365: One size does NOT fit all
Many others familiar with Office 365 and Google for Work take a much less neutral stance than Wiora and Burke; both companies have dedicated users and evangelists.

Martin Milanov, a digital marketing specialist at Fair Point, a corporate travel management firm based in Germany, writes that he "will scream to the ends of hell if they take away my Excel and make me use the, let's face it, subpar Excel wannabe that is Google Sheets."

Kristin Bassett, corporate marketing manager at AppNeta, an application performance management provider, says her company recently switched from Microsoft to Google to get all employees on the same email system. The firm chose to migrate its entire staff to Google for Work because it preferred Gmail to Outlook and considered email its highest-priority tool.

Many of the engineers working for AppNeta had requested corporate access to Gmail, according to Bassett, and the switch improved the company's ability to hire and retain engineers, who are core to its business.

Regardless of platform, it's about preparation
Both Burke and Wiora encourage CIOs to gain a deep understanding of their users' needs and company goals before deciding on Google for Work or Office 365.

"We've worked with thousands of customers across both platforms, and the most successful deployments involved a highly democratic approach where they set up small pilot groups, talked to managers in different departments, discussed pros and cons for both platforms, and generally took the time to make sure they were making the best decision for their users and not for their IT department or existing infrastructure," says Burke.

For some CIOs, a hybrid approach will work best, according to Wiora. However, using both platforms can also lead to more work and potential problems for IT. "Each new service increases complexity for end users exponentially rather than linearly, so reducing confusion from having information in so many places will be critical for anyone using a hybrid approach," says Wiora.

Above all, CIOs shouldn't delay the necessary research and piloting, and they should try to make a decision as quickly as possible, according to Burke. "Whether your organization chooses Google Apps or Office 365, you're getting a cloud office platform that's going to fundamentally change the way your business operates if it's correctly implemented and thoroughly adopted," he says.

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Big names like Google dominate open-source funding

Companies can get plenty of bang for not many bucks via open-source sponsorship.

Network World’s analysis of publicly listed sponsors of 36 prominent open-source non-profits and foundations reveals that the lion’s share of financial support for open-source groups comes from a familiar set of names.

We found 673 companies on the donor rolls of our list of organizations – which was drawn heavily, though not entirely, from the Open Source Initiative’s list of affiliates.

Google was the biggest supporter of open-source organizations by our count, appearing on the sponsor lists of eight of the 36 groups we analyzed. Four companies – Canonical, SUSE, HP and VMware – supported five groups each, and seven others supported four. (Nokia, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Intel and NEC.) For its part, Red Hat supports three groups – the Linux Foundation, Creative Commons and the Open Virtualization Alliance.

It’s tough to get more than a general sense of how much money gets contributed to which foundations by which companies – suffice it to say, however, that the numbers aren’t large by the standards of the big contributors. According to Pro Publica’s non-profit records, the average annual revenue for the open-source organizations considered in our analysis was $4.36 million, and that number was skewed by the $27 million taken in by the Wikimedia Foundation (whose interests range far beyond open-source software development) and the $17 million posted by the

Linux Foundation.
Split between, say, half a dozen companies, and even the Linux Foundation doesn’t look too hard to fund. What’s $2.83 million a year to Intel? The non-hypothetical, real-world price tag is actually lower, as it turns out – the foundation said that it charges $500,000 per year for platinum membership, $100,000 a year for gold, and anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 for silver, depending on the size of the company.

It should be pointed out that this is still far from a complete picture – we used the most recent numbers available, but those were frequently from as long ago as 2011, and this doesn’t account for the many overseas groups and others not covered by the database – but it does suggest that, to a company like Google, even relatively major donations barely make a dent in the bottom line.

Another thing keeping the picture incomplete was a reluctance by some of the bigger companies to speak to us on the subject of their activities within the open-source community. We got only boilerplate responses back from two companies, and from list-topping Google, no response at all.
So what do they get out of it?

In the main, companies that support open-source nonprofits get brownie points – your developers can work on a project without the company joining an official foundation (and, importantly, vice versa), so the benefits of direct participation in a project aren’t necessarily related to the non-profit angle.

But those brownie points are far from valueless. All those services provided by non-profits are important to lots of people in the open-source community. Tejun Heo, a prominent kernel developer and Red Hat employee, gave the example of a hobbyist developer attending one of the many conferences on open-source held every year.

“A sponsoring company … would have a lot easier time getting acquainted with the person, and he or she would be a lot more likely to be familiar with and have a positive impression of the company,” he said.

A lot of that goodwill, Heo added, has to do with the job market – sponsorship can make companies more attractive to potentially valuable developers, while keeping them in the loop on individual projects.

“Even if it doesn’t directly result in hiring, the wider contact surface ensures that Red Hat at least can stay in contact with what’s going on in terms of both technical and human resources aspects of the project,” he said.

More even than that, companies like Red Hat employ a lot of people that are just big fans of open-source in the first place, according to Heo.

Of course, some see hints of whitewash in the movement of big tech companies toward the open-source world’s nonprofits. It’s important to note that support for those organizations doesn’t necessarily translate into actual code contributions to open-source projects.

A look at the most recent edition of the Linux Foundation’s “Who Writes Linux” publication, which covers 2013, found that Red Hat was the largest corporate contributor of code to the Linux kernel, at 10.2% of the total. Close behind is Intel, at 8.8%. So far, that tallies with the list of open-source organizations sponsored, but the similarities partially fall away from there – the two next-biggest code contributors were Texas Instruments and Linaro, both of which are supporters of just one organization, the Linux Foundation.

Obviously, this doesn’t prove much on its own – it’s tough to directly compare code contributions and sponsorship, and it doesn’t account for work done on any other projects besides the kernel. But the discrepancy is noteworthy in several cases. Google, for example, contributed less than a quarter of the kernel code that Red Hat did.

Jay Lyman, an analyst with 451 Research, highlighted both positive and negative attributes to corporate sponsorship in open source.

“[Participation] is good in the sense that organizations are focused on real benefits and results, but it could make it easier for those seeking to leverage open-source communities without participating or contributing,” he said.

What do foundations do?
So what do foundations do? In the case of major organizations like the Linux Foundation, it seems almost easier to ask what they don’t do.

The group has a legal defense fund, patent commons, trademark management program, workgroups for several technical focus areas like SDN and accessibility and lots more – not to mention the basic development and testing infrastructure that enables Linux development.

“And we’ll throw in a subscription to Outside Magazine, and a wind-up radio,” jokes Jim Zemlin, the group’s executive director.

Not every non-profit’s operations are so extensive, of course – many provide not much more than training, advocacy and/or a basic organization and collaboration framework for smaller projects, or for geographically clustered groups of open-source developers. But the principle is the same.

One other unique facet to the Linux Foundation’s activities is the group’s direct employment of Linus Torvalds – final arbiter over all things Linux kernel and probably the most powerful person in open-source – helps avoid allegations of bias over the direction of the project – which is an issue, though not as contentious as one might suppose, given the fact that many of the most active code contributors to Linux are employed by some of the same companies that underwrite the non-profit.

Tejun Heo said that there’s “no tension at all” between his employer and the broader kernel community.

“If I think something is a technically better direction, that’s the direction I follow. Even when that mismatches with what Red Hat internal engineering was expecting,” he said.

“Somebody once told me that [Red Hat] is a company where a bunch of open-source engineers hired management and marketing people to run the boring, money side of things so that they can continue to do whatever they like, and while it’s a bit of an exaggeration I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that,” he noted.

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Mozilla unveils search tool tweaks in next week's Firefox 34

New tools will accompany change from Google to Yahoo as default search engine for U.S. customers

Along with its impending switch to Yahoo as the default search engine for Firefox, Mozilla will also change how users conduct searches in the browser, the company said Tuesday.

Searches done in the next version of Firefox will display not only a list of suggested searches that narrow the results, but will show buttons for search engines other than the default, said Philipp Sackl, a lead designer of Firefox, in a blog post yesterday.

"These buttons allow you to find your search term directly on a specific site quickly and easily," Sackl wrote.

For example, a search for "US Grant" started in Firefox's default search engine can be switched to Wikipedia for results there by clicking a button.

Mozilla has implemented the changes in the beta of Firefox 34, which is scheduled for promotion to the finished, polished build next week. In the beta, Firefox 34 shows search-switch buttons for all available providers, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, Twitter and Wikipedia. Users can also add additional search engines.

Other browsers, such as Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, lack similar tools, although Safari does offer a short list of suggested searches when a string is typed into its address bar.

Mozilla will introduce the search tweaks next week when it ships the production version of Firefox 34, currently slated for a Dec. 1 release. At the same time, Mozilla will also introduce Yahoo as the default search engine in the U.S.

"Under a new five-year strategic partnership ... Yahoo Search will become the default search experience for Firefox in the U.S.," Mozilla CEO Chris Beard said last week.

Beard's description implied that Mozilla will automatically change the default search engine within Firefox from the earlier Google to Yahoo for all U.S. customers. But in the beta of Firefox 34 the previous default -- Google -- remained in place.

Mozilla may face resistance from existing users if it changes the search engine to Yahoo without their permission when Firefox updates itself next week. Firefox users will be able to change the default to another provider, including back to Google, however.

Mozilla did not immediately reply to questions about how it will handle the change from Google to Yahoo within Firefox.

Firefox, unlike its browser rivals, will continue to use separate search and address bars rather than unify them into one field where users can type not only URLs but also search strings. Safari, Chrome and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) all offer a unified address-search bar.

"That has been looked at several times, but there are difficult privacy problems to overcome if you also want to provide search suggestions," said Gervase Markham of Mozilla in an answer Wednesday to a user's comment appended to Sackl's post. "If someone is typing a URL, they don't necessarily want their default search engine to know where they are going. And yet, if you want to provide search suggestions well, you have to send every keystroke in a unified box to the search provider."

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