Comparing Office 365 to Google Apps

Office 365 and Google Apps are both well known for their office productivity software in the cloud. When comparing the two, you must first realize that they are surprisingly similar to one and other. Hardenburgh (2016), "The applications that both Google Apps and Office 365 are most known for are their productivity suite apps that include a word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet software”. Office 365 and Google Apps also provided users with email service and cloud storage space.

Office 365 and Google Apps similarities Both Office 365 and Google Apps gives users a level of navigation familiarity as well as providing familiar core features such as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation tools and email. Besides these familiar components, Office 365 and Google Apps offer real time collaboration and sharing, and online file storage while still allowing documents to be edited offline (Bradley, 1998-2016). The ability to navigate and search documents if you are not online, as well as being able to import, export, revise and created alternate versions of files, are also valuable features provided by Office 365 and Google Apps. Another highlighted feature of both applications is the ability to work off line. These features are valuable to the user in cases where the internet may be down or they are unable to go online (Hardenburgh, 2016). Being given the ability to utilize the benefits of the cloud while maintaining the freedom to work offline is yet another great feature that Office 365 and Google Apps share. .
Office 365 and Google Apps differences Although both Office 365 and Google Apps are very similar, there are a few differences. For starters, the familiarity of Office 365 is a bonus for users. When using Google Apps there would be a slight learning curve compared to the already familiar Office application. Office 365 merely revamped Office 2010 by simplifying and reducing certain components and advancing other features. The majority of users are already familiar with Office programs and therefore are more at ease with transitioning to Office 365 over Google Apps (Hardenburgh, 2016). One of the main differences to discuss between Office 365 and Google Apps involves sharing and collaboration. Hardenburgh (2016), "Where Google Docs documents have a more straightforward approach to sharing and collaboration, Office 365 puts in place a number of mechanisms to prevent two authors from editing the same data at the time. Both can be noted as suitable for even the largest of enterprises though, especially when considering that this kind of technology is rather new, and really not available elsewhere, at least on a wide scale”. Bradley (1998-2016) Unlike Google Apps, Office 365 offers web apps that gives the user options such as integrating with the desktop equivalent of programs such as OneNote, PowerPoint, Excel and even Word. Another difference involved in the sharing and collaboration of Office 365 and Google Apps is that Office 365 has an app called SharePoint Workspace that allows data to sync for Office 365 SharePoint Online for offline use. Bradley (1998-2016), "With Google Apps you could use something like Box.net or Dropbox to sync data for offline access. Of course, without access to the online productivity tools themselves, offline access to the data may not be worth much”. Some of the other main differences between Office 365 and Google Apps involve files and storage. Bradley (1998-2016), "The basic Office 365 plan gives you 2GB of data storage space on SharePoint Online; additional space costs $2.50 per gigabyte per user per month. For email, each user has 25GB on the entry-level plan, while higher Office 365 plans have unlimited email storage. Office 365 also allows the biggest file attachments, up to 35MB”. Google Apps does offer the same 25 MB attachment size to emails but falls short, offering 1GB of data storage. Users can increase the storage capability of Google by integrating their documents with Box.net storage. Box.net and Google partnered to provide users the option for an additional 5GB of data storage at no cost (Bradley, 1998-2016).

Conclusion When deciding between Office 365 and Google Apps as office productivity software, it really falls to preference. They are very comparable but have a couple of obvious differences as well. If Data storage and being able to sync your data offline is important to you, the best choice for you would most likely be Office 365. Beyond that, both Office 365 and Google Apps are great options for office productivity software

References
Hardenburgh, I. (2016). TechRepublic. Retrieved from http://www.techrepublic.com
Bradley, T. (1998-2016). PCWorld. Retrieved from http://www.pcworld.com