Office 365 Small Business, for up to 25 users, does not include the Office 2013 desktop apps (though you would be forgiven for assuming otherwise). I fully expect books, seminars, and postgrad university courses are in the offing, to help hapless customers pick from what's available. While Google Apps for Business remains relatively straightforward, with four packages and identical features, Office 365's ecosystem is starting to look like an Exchange Server CAL contract. Sorting through the Office 365 SKUsIf you're looking for a simple straight-up comparison of features and prices, you clearly don't understand the game. We'll just have to wait and see if the company builds it out. It isn't clear at this point if Apple's going to actively pursue the market.
Google or office 365 for small business free#
There's no need to swing a sledgehammer when an ordinary hammer will do.Ī note about Apple and the iWorks suite: While iWorks contains applications that handle the basics - and they're now free for just about everybody - the apps aren't nearly as capable as the Google Apps, and there's no "glue" to build the kind of infrastructure most businesses (and many individuals) need. Most people, most of the time, don't need Word's or Excel's ginormous feature set. Here I look at both packages' applicability in a mixed environment, where only a small percentage - perhaps 10 or 20 percent - of the people using the package actually need Office. That's why I've approached this review from a new perspective. While Office hasn't yet been relegated to the bit bucket of history, the overarching need for Office is lower now than it has been in the past two decades. Most execs (at least in my experience) now realize that full-blown Office is overkill for many of their employees. Which of these propositions meshes more closely with the needs of business users? Back in June 2011, if you asked a handful of execs whether their people need to run Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you probably would have heard a resounding if unreflective "Yes!" Nowadays, the status of the Office triumvirate isn't nearly as secure. But the original propositions have remained the same: Office 365 aims to be all things to all companies, while Google Apps is content to offer key capabilities without the bloat and complexity. Google Apps has a fresh coat of paint and a new sail.
While there's nothing wrong with minimalism, particularly with budgets as tight as they are these days, you need to make sure Google Apps can do what you need it to do, before you commit.Īt the risk of stretching the metaphor, Office 365 has added several new decks, a top-to-bottom refurbishment, and a couple of new lifeboats. I've seen significant strides in Office file compatibility and a few new features, but Google's still taking a minimalist approach. It's still a small, light, considerably cheaper, one-size-fits-all proposition. The changes in Google Apps, in direct contrast, are much more subtle.
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