Office 365 & Google Docs Smackdown - And the winner is...

I was recently asked why we recommended Office 365 instead of Google and the collaboration tools called Google Docs, when most Google services are free.  My first thought was to wonder if having the constant interruption of unsolicited advertising is actually a significant hidden cost, but that’s a subject for another day. Thankfully, when you sign up as an organization using Google Docs the advertising stops.

Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365 are a set of web based productivity tools used by many individuals and organizations. From a product origination standpoint, Google Docs evolved out of features developed for individual Gmail users and Microsoft Office 365 was developed as an extension of the popular Microsoft Office suite of programs. The origin of these two systems is an important distinction and should not be overlooked.

Here is a summary of features in both:

Domain based email (you@yourdomain.org):  Google Mail vs.  Exchange Email
Word Processing:     Document vs. Word
Spreadsheets and Calculations:    Spreadsheet  vs. Excel
Presentation:       Presentation  vs. PowerPoint
Note taking/ Other     Form & Drawing vs. One Note
Document Storage, Sharing, and Collaboration:  Google Docs  vs. SharePoint
Instant Messaging & Voice over Internet Protocol: Google Voice  vs. Lync 2010

Microsoft Office has always been about providing advanced document creation and management, while Google and subsequently Google Docs have evolved from the monetization of your eyeballs looking at advertisements. How we got here might be an interesting academic exercise, but you are probably more interested in knowing which is best for your organization. For our purposes today, we will compare Google Docs with the Office 365 E-2 plan, which are roughly equivalent in features and both are free for education.

My purpose is not to do a feature by feature comparison and evaluate relative merits and/or weaknesses. That has been done many times by a number of objective authors. Rather, my purpose is to consider the two systems in their entirety and evaluate the way in which you might work in a more seamless and integrated fashion.

A comparison of features suggests a great deal of similarity in the two products, but there are important differences. The most important differentiator is the integration with your Microsoft technologies.

But wait you say, we are an Apple based organization. Well if that is the case, then you are really not asking the right question at all with respect to this article. But it does make a point.

Before you can decide upon which of the productivity suites, Google Docs or Office 365, is right for you; there needs to be a candid evaluation of your school computing environment. If you are primarily an Apple organization or an Open Source organization, then my opinion is that there is little difference between the two (unless you are using the Mac version of Office).  However, if you are operating primarily in a Microsoft environment, Office 365 is a clear winner. And the reason is the deep and feature rich integration between the Microsoft Desktop and the cloud (Office 365).

What do I mean about integration, well let’s consider the definition:

Integration (from the Latin integer, meaning whole or entire) generally means combining parts so that they work together or form a whole.

Integration in Office 365 takes many forms, perhaps the most important is the ability to move on and off your desktop, laptop, or other device and have your documents with you – even when you are offline (no internet). This takes the form of automatic synchronization of documents and emails once you reconnect. With Google Docs and email if you have no internet connection you are out of business.

Another deep integration feature is the management of complex documents on your desktop.
For most teachers, and certainly all but your most advanced students, the web based tools of either Google Docs or Office 365 web based services will be adequate. But your key administrators, school secretaries, and finance staff will be severely handicapped using only the web based version of Word (Document) or Excel (Spreadsheet). Accordingly, having the capacity to move seamlessly between the simple and the complex within the same interface is crucial. In other words, you can’t create documents with advanced formatting in either web based version, but you can create them on your desktop version of Office and save it to Office 365 without difficulty. Not the case with Google Docs.

I’ll mention one more deep integration feature, with respect to document management specifically. In Office 365, you can save your documents to a folder that appears to be on your computer, but actually resides in the cloud (Office 365). And you can use familiar drag and drop functions to move documents to the various folders in either environment. Furthermore, you can set up the automatic synchronization of those documents.

If you do a simple search on Office 365 vs. Google Docs and you find a wide variety of experts extolling the virtues of Office 365 or Google Docs, depending upon which they favor. And for the record, the reviews I saw tended to favor Office 365 overall, but only slightly.  Now that Google Docs no longer enjoys any kind of cost advantage, perhaps even more so.

However, almost all reviews pointed to the superior functionality of Office 365 when combined with the desktop version of Office Professional (desktop software).

In the world of commercial organizations this is a huge barrier to overcome, but in the world of academic licensing you get Office Professional plus as part of your Microsoft licensing agreement for schools. See my previous article about Open Value Subscription for Education Services (OVS-ES). This weighs the comparison heavily in favor of Office 365.

Let’s add one other significant factor to this system level comparison. The Live@EDU services, which provide cloud based email, document sharing, and social functions for students is now part of Office 365 and designed specifically for education, not business in general. Integrating Live@EDU into your school provides email, cloud based storage, collaboration tools for lesson material between students and teachers, and a controlled social platform for student creativity. These are enormously helpful tools, particularly for upper grade levels. In fact some have used the Live@EDU services as the foundation for a robust Learning Management System.

Finally, management and support is far, far superior in Office 365. For starters, you get unlimited technical support with a live human being – not a search engine. And the increased level of detail for administering the services is substantial. In fact, you’ll probably need to have some level of expertise on staff to help you manage this because you are actually controlling to a large extent the actual server environment hosting your services.

Oh, and one last thing.  A core element of your data management plan, which should have oversight policies with respect to your schools intellectual property, should address how you control data.  Google docs accounts normally evolve out of individual Gmail accounts and therefore (by definition) violate the most basic tenants of your data management plan.

If you have ever experienced a legal discovery, you will understand how difficult it can be to gain access to communication by staff members who are using primarily their personal email accounts or personally owned Google Docs accounts.  True, an enterprise wide version Google Doc’s can be setup, but trying to do that after a user has years of mostly personal stuff in the system may not be an easy task.

Summary

When you consider these two cloud based productivity suites as a complex communication tool, you have to consider more than just the list of features and the cost. You must consider your data management plan, the makeup of your users (and their computing preferences), the organizations computing environment, and how well the service will integrate into your infrastructure.

Most comparisons look at a list of features and do a side by side comparison, and while that is helpful, it seems that it ignores the one obvious question.  Here’s the question:  In which format do you create the significant documents used in your organization? Statistics still suggest a large majority of you use Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Power Point. And to a lesser extent you may use other products in the Office Professional Plus 2010 suite.

Do you honestly think that using Google docs to manage Microsoft originated documents would be a superior solution?
 
Admittedly, the individual Gmail account and related Google doc features for individuals are impressive and useful. But extending that organization wide is a fundamentally different matter.  Personal Gmail accounts are entirely inadequate for use in a public school setting (same goes for Hotmail or yahoo mail). Privacy issues alone should give you pause. But ultimately the administration of the school has no control over individual owned email accounts or Google Docs accounts.

If you ultimately decide to use Google Docs, please be sure to set it up properly with appropriate groups, permissions, and access control. Do it as an organization, not as a collection of individuals, and incorporate your schools domain name into the service.

And let’s end on a positive note – a shout out for Google docs. It is a far superior solution to using nothing, and it is a great solution for those using email accounts included with their website hosting service, drop box, ever note, or the other variety of sharing solutions.

It is however, a distance second class competitor to Microsoft Office 365 in my humble opinion. In all probability, the popularity of Google Docs is due to the features that users loved about Microsoft Office, but were unwilling to pay for. And frankly that used to be a good reason…. but no longer.

One Server or Seven – How many do you need?

One Server or Seven – How many do you need

Over the summer I have had occasion to visit a number of new schools. As I have done so, it is quite interesting to hear of the experiences of various school administrators.

One thing that surprised me is the wide variety of resources, measured by server count, which these similar schools possessed.

It would seem, given relative size and complexity that you would find an average server count – such as an average of 2.5 servers per school. But our experience suggests a much wider range of server capacity than you would expect. And while that is an interesting statistic (quite unscientific, I might add) what is even more surprising is the level of satisfaction we found between schools at the opposing end of the spectrum.

The school we observed having the most rational and functional information technology infrastructure had exactly one (1) server.  That school also reported the greatest degree of satisfaction in being able to manage their information systems effectively with very few outside resources.

On the other end of the spectrum was the school with the highest server count, seven (7) to be exact. Contrary to what you would expect, this school complained about irrational IT infrastructure, higher than desired management costs, and a very dysfunctional environment. 

I confess this is a very narrow sample and not a scientific study by any means. But, these are two very real schools, with very capable administrators and staff, each reporting a widely different technology experience.

One of the fundamental challenges we see with Charter Schools is that they are usually operated by administrators who come from traditional school districts, with conventional ways of doing things. That convention sometimes does not work in managing Charter School technology. Size and complexity of technology really does matter when managing a single campus freestanding charter school.

Without a thorough review of systems in either of these schools it would be unfair to characterize their technology providers as being irresponsible, but it begs the question – why so many or few. Sadly the answer may have more to do with the financial well-being of those recommending high server counts than what is best for the school.

Here is a list of common server roles and how you might outsource them at great savings:

Domain controller and active directory server

This common network environment provides user access control and group policy management to simplify administration of users. It requires a unique network ID or login for each user and individual passwords. While this may be necessary for schools that enroll older students, it can be very cumbersome for the younger grades. Students younger than 5^th or 6^th grade have great difficulty remembering usernames and passwords, so there is often a standard username and password published, which in effect invalidates your security policy.

Alternative – Office 365

Consider moving your user authentication to the cloud, where access is anywhere, anytime, and on any device. After all, the most common benefit for having active directory is so that your Desktop, Favorites, and My Documents follow you around.

Web server for hosting your website

Most organizations abandoned this practice years ago as hosting companies began stepping over each other to offer you website hosting facilities for a few dollars each month. But there are still a few diehards who insist on hosting their own website on their own hardware. This might be more of a job security play than a practical solution. Not only is this expensive, but the security ramifications are enormous. If your website sits inside your network perimeter, the chance of a security breach is greatly increased.

Alternative – West Host, Blue Host, or any other Web Hosting company

You honestly cannot even power a webserver inside your building for the cost associated with an annual hosting agreement at a website hosting company. And even if the power to run your web server was free, it would still cost you to maintain it. Only in the most unusual of circumstances does it make sense to host your own website.

Microsoft Exchange Email Server

Email is a critical business system in most schools, so up until recently we had an MS Exchange Email Server in every school we managed. But email as a hosted solution is a much more practical, reliable, and inexpensive solution.

Alternative – Office 365

 Don’t walk, but run to http://www.office 365.com and sign up for Exchange based email services that are now available free to academic organizations. It will be more reliable than your in-house email server, much less expensive to own and operate, and it will eliminate SPAM and Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE).

Exchange based email has so many advantages by way of features, security, and compliance that it is the gold standard communication platform for many organizations – large and small. If you are still using the email accounts that come free with your hosting account then your being negligent and probably spending much more time and energy than you would imagine dealing with the ramifications of such services.

Accounting Application Server

There are some really robust accounting packages used for education and hopefully you have found the right solution. But I have never understood why a charter school enterprise that has essentially one source of funding (State or Federal programs) needs an accounting program costing thousands of dollars each year, when a copy of QuickBooks will do.

But QuickBooks needs a server, right? Well, perhaps not  – a decent business class workstation, yes. A multi-core server with advanced drive arrays, gobs of memory, and expensive tape drive? Probably not.

Alternative – QuickBooks Online

And if you really want to simplify and cut costs, consider QuickBooks online. It requires “0” hardware and is available from anywhere at any time. And that’s pretty handy for allowing administrators access to reports when they are relaxing at home.

Server for Staff Shared Drive(s) or Student Shared Drive(s)

There are many challenges associated with managing documents on a “Shared Drive”, yet this seems to be a standard setup in every school (well except those we configure). This is a classic case of “We’ve always done it that way”, without considering the great improvements of technology advances.

SharePoint has been one of Microsoft’s fastest growing technologies for the past decade. It is the modern day version of a Shared Drive, with many advantages.  It provides all of the sharing capabilities of a shared drive, without the limitations.

Here are the challenges associated with shared drives that SharePoint eliminates:

·         Security – By definition a shared folder is available to pretty much everyone,  at least that is the common scenario. And some things just should not be shared – like HR records, medical records, employment contracts, etc.

·         Overwrites – Ever wiped out another staff members document changes after they spent hours  on a joint project. That’s not a fun experience, but happens routinely with a Shared documents.

·         Versioning – Have you ever edited a document only to discover that the version you had two iterations back was better? Or have you collaborated with someone on a joint project and needed to revisit changes of a month ago? Or do you simply not know which copy of your document contains the latest revisions? That is a common shared drive experience.

·         Notification – Want to know when a document is changed or a document is added to a Shared Drive – good luck, without SharePoint.

Alternative – SharePoint in Office 365

In addition to solving the above challenges associated with Shared Drives, SharePoint also provides real cost savings to your school in the form of reduced IT management costs. Here is how:

·         Eliminating servers will eliminate hours billed at your highest technician rates

·         Eliminating USB drives will save costs and improve access to documents

·         Eliminating access issues (remote access, different classroom access, etc) eliminates IT requirements

Summary

Charter schools, which typically have fewer resources for IT management, can tap into the economies of scale that are the basis of cloud computing. Many traditional “server” requirements can now be outsources with improved security, functionality, and cost. If you have more servers than you need, consider moving that functionality to the cloud.