Anyone using Google Apps exclusively for business?

We're a small office and maintain about 4 different licenses of MS Office. I've known about Google Apps for awhile but have been reluctant to try using it as a replacement for MS Office. I'm starting to reconsider, my brother-in-law is the IT director for a local college and he says they're really happy with Google Apps.

Anyone here move from MS Office to Google? Main thing that has me nervous is whether I can ever go back down the road once I get started. Thanks.

kinda like going from PC to Mac

If you have no problem storing, "every single key stroke" you or your organization types, on multiple severs world wide, forever... I guess not. You know Google will never miss-use your information.

Internet Privacy Regulations Need to be Adopted, Says Industry Execs

"Apparently, Google's Street View cars were picking up passwords, Internet history and personal emails from unencrypted WiFi (News - Alert) networks in London and surrounding areas. Google was found to have committing the same violations in the U.S., but federal authorities let the company off with a warning after concluding that it had taken the proper steps to make sure that a repeat offense does not occur."

I would suggest open office instead. OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

NeedCNC said:

If you have no problem storing, "every single key stroke" you or your organization types, on multiple severs world wide, forever... I guess not. You know Google will never miss-use your information.

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That's pretty much my big concern with any form of cloud computing. I don't know if it's something in the water over there or what, but many of my old friends in Seattle are moving their business computing to cloud models of one sort or another.

After thinking about it more, I don't think I'm comfortable with the security question. Especially after I just spent the last 1-2 years bringing our network up to a decent security level: on site backups, off site backups, hardware firewalls, closed wifi routers, eliminated DHCP, web content filters, and moving all work stations under control of a centralized "group policy".

After all that, I think I'll wait out the first generation of this cloud computing fad and see if it's still around in 3 years. Thanks for the sounding board. I'm still all ears if someone want's to try to convince me otherwise.

El Mustachio said:

We're a small office and maintain about 4 different licenses of MS Office. I've known about Google Apps for awhile but have been reluctant to try using it as a replacement for MS Office. I'm starting to reconsider, my brother-in-law is the IT director for a local college and he says they're really happy with Google Apps.

Anyone here move from MS Office to Google? Main thing that has me nervous is whether I can ever go back down the road once I get started. Thanks.

Click to expand...

I use Open Office, have done for quite a while. It's free. I don't have any problems exchanging documents with MS Office people.

PDW

PDW said:

I use Open Office, have done for quite a while. It's free. I don't have any problems exchanging documents with MS Office people.

PDW

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+1 for open office
OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

+1 more for Open Office.. I don't want my stuff all over someplace else.

Open Office

I like Open Office, in fact I use it at home and run it off of a flash drive OS (Portable Apps) for personal use. I guess my original thought was more along the lines of MS Office vs. "cloud". If I was only trying to get away from MS Offices' suite of desktop software, Open Office would be my first choice. I think for the time being I've been talked out of anything "cloud" based.

This has brought up a different issue though. I need to look at a couple of my software packages (especially Solidworks), they use Excel plugins to handle some data, like BOM's. I also use an ERP system that has a very fast one-click export to excel for data. I would assume things like that would not work with Open Office. I'll have to look into it. You've all got me thinking

Before making your decision, take a look at this comparative information: Compare Microsoft Productivity Software to Google Apps

Regards,
Jodi E.
Microsoft SMB Outreach Team
[email protected]

El Mustachio said:

I guess my original thought was more along the lines of MS Office vs. "cloud".

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You really have to separate the issues of cloud from the issue of the applications themselves. If you want/need MS Office type features, then google apps is not an option, having nothing to do with cloud. The applications themselves (word processing, spreadsheets, etc) are very different. To go google apps, you have to accept a more limited scope of features and functionality in the applications (although the google apps also have unique features that MS Office does not)

But liking MS Office (and/or Exchange) doesn't mean you have to do it locally and reject cloud. Microsoft is coming out with a suite of cloud services that will be designed/advertised to be the best of both worlds -- the MS apps you know and love, with the advantages of the cloud (whether they pull this off successfully remains to be seen however.) Also, you can use google just as a storage place. I keep all my MS Office docs in google cloud.

Personally, I use both daily and extensively and see pros and cons to each. MS Word and Excel have lots of useful and needed features, but Word is so bloated and poorly designed that I hate using it (but must every day.) On the other hand, the simplicity and ease of use of google apps and the fact that it's in the cloud is a real joy. It's almost like I don't even store documents anyone. I have virtually no files on any of my 3 daily use computers (home, office, laptop) -- everything is instantly available from anywhere there is a browser, including my other device -- a phone.

There is no doubt cloud is here to stay and not a fad. The days of running your own machines for routine stuff like office productivity apps and document storage are numbered. Whether people continue to do this for three years or five years is a question, but no one will be doing it 7-10 years from now. But where and how they'll be doing it is a question.

I'll largely sidestep the issues of security and of trusting your data in the cloud and/or to the stewardship of the vendors (MS, google) because that issue gets political and even quasi "religious" with people. I will say however that I work in IT in a medium-sized corporate environment ($30M, 200 IT staff) and we have closely examined the services and security of google over the last couple years and we have generally reached the conclusion that they can provide equal or greater degree of reliability and security than we can, and they can do it less expensively than we can due to the efficiencies they have from their enormous scale. We didn't look at MS, but I am certain that many businesses will reach the same conclusion with MS cloud services.