Google Apps vs. Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite

We are a small (staff of 9) national non-profit. I am looking to get rid of our expensive to maintain, crash prone server and move to the cloud. We currently live in Exchange 2003. I am considering Google Apps (we already have the free educational edition) and Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite. The BPOS costs $15 per user per month (30% discount if we buy before the end of the year) and comes with online exchange, sharepoint and a few other goodies. I personally want to go to Google Apps, but I have a few users who are recalcitrant to change over. I need our solution to work perfectly with Outlook so that I'm not wasting my time answering complaints. I have heard that the Google Outlook Sync doesn’t work perfectly and requires more time to set up and maintain whereas the BPOS is seamless and very easy to administer.

Does anyone have any experience with both systems? Would we be foolish to pay $2000 a year when we can get Google Apps for free? I’d pay $2000 a year to avoid headaches and user backlash if that’s what it takes.

Thank you.

I don't know about BPOS, but I like Google Apps quite a bit. I do admit that online services like this make me a little worried about security and also availability. What happens to your business or organization if you lose access?

Others may post information that will be more helpful, but I would try a pilot test using Google Apps with 1-3 users. See how it works and what changes you have to do in the way you work. If you find it suits your needs, then you can see if you can get your org to adopt it as a standard.

If there are problems, then at least you have not made a financial investment, just an investment of time.

What are you going to be using for word processing?  I'll be very honest - for some things Google Docs is adequate, but for others, it simply does not come close to what people need.

Some issues: 

Printing seems like an afterthought. Just about every time I need to make sure that a document can print properly, I need to do extensive formatting. The single biggest problem is that there is something about the way it is spaced that things print on way too many pages. For example, my 20 year old daughter just put together her resume. She does have a fair bit of work experience, but still, there is no reason that it printed on THREE pages! I wound up exporting to to Word and tweaking things like the spacing. The combination of non-wysiwyg and arbitrary (and non-transparent) settings creates a mess to clean up. The worst is that when you go to create a PDF, you get the output much as it would printed, which is generally decidedly unacceptable.

Formatting options are limited. Tables are painfully limited. Word leaves something to be desired with multi-level outlines, but is head and shoulders above Google Docs. Font choice is another limitation. While few people need 2,000 fonts available, individuals and organizations need to be able to choose the handful of fonts that THEY want to use, which Office gives you.  As for font size, I can't imagine what they were thinking.

Sharing can be a pain. That's odd, considering that one of the main reasons for the existence of google apps is easy sharing. They have improved one issue, now that they allow the sharing of folders. However, once you have gotten used to a decent server based sharing system, there is way too much work involved in granting permissions to multiple people. I don't know how the on-line version of office deals with that.

On the other hand, since you are getting google apps free, if you do wind up with BPOS, you may want tohave your mail go through Gmail first and then onto your hosted exchange. It would provide a backup to your email, and Google has excellent spam filtering (I'm fairly sure they use the postini technology).

Lots of luck!

I recently attended a workshop with Google representatives to discuss how Google Apps can help non-profit organizations.  They convinced me that what they are providing is the way of the future, but currently I feel a lot of their apps are not as robust as I need them to be.

I have been using Google docs for sharing spreadsheets the past year and I find it invaluable to do so.  I like how they are accessible from any computer or device that has access to the web.  So convenience is a big factor on that.  But formatting and creating the document can be a struggle.  The spreadsheet app specifically gives me a headache during creation so I usually will make the document in excel and then upload it to Google once i'm ready to use and share it.

I have not had any experience with the GMail integration or using google calendars in a business environment, but from what I saw demonstrated at the workshop, it was very intuitive and if I could migrate my office away from a shared outlook calendar, I would probably push to move it all onto Google for that (again for the accessibility aspect).

You might want to try and contact Google and see if they can't either come to you business or speak with you by phone and show you some of the innovative things their Apps can do for your particular organization.  They have been very helpful so far on my end.

Also, another option for productivity suites might be http://www.openoffice.org/.    If you are just looking for a good Word Editor and Spreadsheet program, these will do wonders for you and not cost a dime.  If you need a photo editing tool, you can use The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) which is a open source program that works like Photoshop without costing an arm and a leg.  And sure you can get I believe both types of programs on here under the software donation section for a very minimal cost, but there are alternatives out there that work just as well and cost nothing and are supported by a community of developers.

I hope this helps you in your decision.

Jeff

What about a solution that's somewhere in between? Something like document sharing? If you were to use something like Dropbox, you could still have the programs you want to use (MS Office, OpenOffice, etc) on local computers but allow group access to documents via Dropbox. Email would still require a solution I suppose, since you're wanting to move away from your own server... It's possible something like Gmail could work for you as it appears to integrate with Outlook.

Someone has already mentioned Dropbox, and I want to emphasize how WONDERFUL it is.  I am the "accidental techie" for a statewide nonprofit with a staff of about 13, including interns and contract consultants, based in two different cities.  We started using Dropbox (the 50GB version) for file sharing in June, and it's been a life-saver.  Everyone downloads the client to their computer, and we all have the latest versions of our shared documents, spreadsheets, photos and more no matter where we are geographically.  Because Dropbox saves files to your hard drive, we also have them when we're offline.  I back up the entire Dropbox to a hard drive every couple weeks just in case, but I've never heard of data loss from Dropbox - in fact, we've used it to recover corrupted and accidentally deleted files.

Before this, we always e-mailed back and forth (we had a pseudo-server set up in the office, but it was iffy), so we had many versions of everything.  Now, we always have the latest version.  The only things we don't use Dropbox for are sensitive files (we keep those on our individual hard drives) and files that we update simultaneously.

For real-time file collaboration, we use Google Docs, having migrated to Google Apps Education edition a couple months ago.  We've had the same experience as others in this thread - as word processing software, it's not great, and printing is terrible, but it's nice to be able to edit simultaneously. 

Switching from our old, clunky, non-html-supporting webmail to Gmail has been transformative as well.  Most of us still use POP3 to manage our mail in Outlook or personal Gmail addresses, but for the two people who were still using the old interface, it's made a huge difference.  It's also nice that I (as system admin) now have control of users and can reset passwords when others forget.  

Several of us use Google Calendar and like it, but we have not tried syncing with Outlook yet.

The transition to Google Apps itself was rushed, so a little frustrating.  After a couple weeks, though, everyone was happily using Google Apps. If you decide to go with Apps, I recommend having a few training sessions with email, calendar and docs before you redirect the MX records and make it live.

I hope that was somewhat useful.  I have never used BPOS.  Feel free to contact me though, if you want to discuss more - johnson at cedam dot info.

-Katie

Thanks sjcc and others for your input on this topic!

I was all ready to move my organization to Google Apps, now I'm going to evaluate Microsoft BPOS first.

Question for sjcc: how does one carry out "have your mail go through Gmail first and then onto your hosted exchange" ?

Thanks!

I don't recall the details, because we wound up not doing it, but I beleive that the instructions on this page are the key http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=77003

If you have Sharepoint then why haven't you used it to collaborate? Sharepoint is made for collaboration and is easy to administer. I would check with your hosting company about the security of Sharepoint, because anything you send out to the cloud can be compromised. I know emails are not secure, and believe anything sent out isn't secure unless it is encrypted using HTTPS/Encryption.

I would also like to know if security of Google App and Office Live be set up, does anyone know?

If your office uses MS Office 2007 then you can use Office Live to share docs and it is easy. You add Office Live to your office 2007 program it adds a "Save to Live" in the menus of your office apps after setting up a collaboration site.

We really need a discussion or training on securing data inside and out to cloud.

cstohr:

We really need a discussion or training on securing data inside and out to cloud.

I'm always amused by discussions about security of the cloud, especially in the context of small/medium businesses or non-profits.  I guarantee you for on-site computers and servers, it's an afterthought unless you have an extraordinarily technical and conscientious person that makes it a priority.  "Security" is one of the most nebulous of all concepts in IT, but it is often the least thought of since it's very hard to measure "security".

For me the biggest boon of cloud computing is I get to leverage a service providers staff.  They can afford to have far more technical and specialized people then I will ever be able to at a typical small business or non-profit.  This shouldn't be underestimated.  I'm not suggesting that all cloud providers are the same, you should be absolutely grilling them about what they do.   The Cloud Security Alliance gives you an excellent start of questioning you should be pursuing when talking to any vendor - get their guide here:   http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/

This is one of the issues I have with Google - even for their paid offerings they are pretty cagey about what they are doing on the back end and all too frequently seem like they are hiding behind their "beta" tag.  But find the right provider and it can be a great fit.

I would love to find a vendor that specializes in either hosted Small Business Server or Windows Server Essentials.  If they can offer end to end seat management even better.  BPOS is neat for email and some collaborative stuff, but I think it is missing too many things to make it a wholesale replacement for local infrastructure, where if I could get a hosted SBS or Essentials solution I would have everything I need.

That and Microsoft's licensing for non-profits is pretty reasonable  :)

eeskam, I would argue that in the types of places where the concerns you listed for security are truly an issue, moving services to the cloud won't help anyone.  Keyloggers, screen recorders, trojan horses, packet sniffers, worms and the like are usually installed on client machines and are just as effective at pulling sensitive data out of a cloud infrastructure as they are out of a LAN.

That's the issue with many SMBs it's difficult to show the value of implementing anything until something goes wrong, since they feel that if it works now why change, (SPEND) our limited resources on something that they feel isn't a priority. So IT is forced to do what is only absolutely necessary to maintain the business. Anti virus is usually an easier sell, because of all the media attention, but really isn't at the top of the list when it comes to security.

Shipley.c hit a good point that most threats start within an organization, that is why "Physical Security" is always at the top of the list and anti virus is low on the list. I think this makes sense since if you protect your data from inside and outside threats then you reduce the likelihood of an attack, but since that cannot be done at 100% we need anti virus/endpoint protection. Also anything sent out to the cloud can be intercepted by sniffers unless you have a "Secure Connection" and that is what we or I need to understand how?

Moving to the cloud helps protect the data in their datacenter (hosting company), but you still send it out to the cloud, and I don't think that data is secure going from point A to point B, am I wrong? Unless you have a secure point to point ethernet, right?

Many of the articles I've found state that you should evaluate the likelihood of the risk occurring. Not to sound paranoid but how do you determine this? I understand that you look at all the factors from, who works there (employees, volunteers, clients), access ETC. I think this can be dangerous because it may cause you to relax the security in your company, until something happens to tell you otherwise. Once this occurs will the company be able to recover?

I myself continue to remind the executives of the company that it is our responsibility to protect our clients' data, and also that when, not if their data is compromised the responsibility will be on the Compliance officer and CEO, not IT. Thanks to the news this point is getting easier to get across to the decision makers in the company. Now that I have their attention I have to explore solutions (affordable) that will meet the needs.

This is why I stated we need a new discussion thread.

cstohr - I agree, how about this thread to talk about security type issues?

There are two issues, beyond the question of whatever security the vendor is providing. The first is, as you said, the security of the connection. There are ways to increase the security, even if you don't have a fully encrypted point to point connection. The other issue is, as noted, that rootkits, keyloggers, and those types of program can compromise you security. That is an issue that a decision about the cloud does not really affect, unless you chop off your desktop' access to the internet completely (I'm not talking about just browser access, but anything at all.)

Office Live looks very promising!  Thanks for the tip cstohr!  A couple of questions:

If we use Office Live, is there a way to "easily" make a copy of what's in the cloud every so often?

Also, looks like Office Live is still in Beta ...  How reliable is it?  Thanks for any help!