Office showdown: Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps

 

PCWorld - The war between Google and Microsoft is heating up. Each tech giant offers a productivity suite serving the essentials for serious work online: word processing, spreadsheets, email, and calendars. Should you ally with Google Apps for Business, or root for Microsoft's Office 365 for Small Business?

My experience with both brands' productivity tools reflects the workflows many small businesses face. In 2007, with staff scattered across several countries, my editorial company started using Google Apps for Business. It offered email, plus shared text documents and spreadsheets all under our company domain name and logo. Meanwhile, on the desktop, we used Microsoft Word and Excel, particularly for complex documents that we shared with clients.

If we were starting over today, we would seriously consider Microsoft's desktop-hybrid Office 365 for Small Business. For years Microsoft wasn't putting significant functionality online, but next week's release of Office 365 Small Business Premium is a big step forward. In addition, Microsoft offers the full, rich Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other applications.

Google and Microsoft each allow personal and business use of their online platform, as well as simultaneous logins to multiple accounts in different browser tabs. Beyond that, however, their platforms differ greatly in usability, functionality, and mobile support. Read on to discover the standout features and surprising weak points of each suite, with a focus on how key tools operate in a Web browser.

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Microsoft Office 365 Launches: Where Office Meets the Cloud

PCMag.Com - Microsoft formally announced its Office 365 suite of online applications this morning, with CEO Steve Ballmer describing the services as "where Microsoft Office meets the cloud." Ballmer talked about the productivity businesses have gained from using Microsoft Office and said businesses wanted more tools for collaboration, instant messaging, real-time virtual meetings, simultaneous editing of documents, shared calendars, and creating websites in SharePoint. Collaboration is critical to business growth and needs to be available to all businesses, from global enterprise to startups, Ballmer said. But today's announcements were focused on small and medium size businesses.He noted that these businesses need an edge, but one that doesn't require big capital investments or IT sites. Kirk Koenigsbauer, a corporate vice president, started a demo by starting with a SharePoint team site, picking a document, and showing how multiple people could open and edit the text. He did this both with the traditional client version of Microsoft Word and with the Web version of Word, showing how the formatting was consistent across the two versions. Koenigsbauer then showed connections to Office 365 from Windows Phone 7, which has an Office "hub," and it included uploading a photo from the phone to a OneNote document. He added that Office 365 would work from iPhone and Android phones as well. He then demoed a Web conference, which included video connections, PowerPoint sharing, whiteboards, etc., all with real-time collaboration. He also displayed a website created in SharePoint, filled with gadgets for things such as adding contact forms and videos.    More