Tagged with office …

Feb 23 2011
Technology

Google Apps, the inside view: ready for prime time

In a Register interview, Google’s Enterprise boss David Girouard challenges Microsoft’s blended web + desktop view of cloud computing and says that, after four years, Google Apps is mature enough to match up to MS Office.

Refreshingly, he admits their support still isn’t up to scratch. Whether a computer science-driven company can learn customer service is the only real question over the technically excellent Apps products.

Microsoft has never bothered with end-user support, relying on resellers (like us) – which makes sense with software installed on customers’ computers, as the installation is often the problem.

Apple, selling consumer hardware, had to build a network of support staff in its stores as well as telephone support centres – and has succeeded far beyond any other customer products company in these. This is particularly creditable when you remember that Apple was a fairly small technical company learning how to do retail and customer services.

But “100% web-based” Google has no stores and the resellers (us again), not having access to the servers and software, are unable to do any deep troubleshooting. To succeed in Enterprise, Google has to reach the same standards of service support as Apple or the early days of Orange.

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Nov 13 2009
Technology

Microsoft Office vs Google Apps – differing strategies

A useful summary from Tim Anderson of the differing strategies of Microsoft and Google in the email/document space. If I knew the winner, I’d place my bet in the stock market… but the collaborative power of Google Apps and the functional maturity of MS Office mean that both are compelling and neither is likely to beat out the other for some years.

Microsoft is pursuing its “software plus services” strategy, which means desktop applications still play an important role. The email is Exchange-based, so you can use other email clients, but only Outlook on Windows will deliver full features. Document collaboration is based primarily on cloud storage rather then editing, though when Office Web Apps appear next year users will have some lightweight editing tools.

Google on the other hand is primarily web based, with desktop support as an add-on. Google has the lead when it comes to online document editing, since it has had Google Docs for some time, whereas Office Web Apps are still in beta. Google has no bias towards Windows and Office. With Google, a document’s primary existence is in the cloud, although you can export and import with possible loss of data or formatting.

Something else I noticed is that Google has big plans for integration with mobile devices, whereas Microsoft seems mainly concerned with Exchange synchronisation.

Microsoft’s pitch is that if you live in Windows anyway, with Exchange and SharePoint on the server, and Windows and Office on the client, then its cloud service integrates nicely. Google on the other hand is more revolutionary, not caring about what you run as long as you can connect to its services.

Although the software plus services idea has attractions, it sounds more like a transitional strategy than one for the long term. Over time, as the web platform gets more powerful, and as rich internet applications take over from pure desktop applications, the services part will grow absolutely dominant.

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Sep 01 2009
Technology

Exchange and Snow Leopard

A guide for those considering switching from Windows/Outlook to Mac for accessing Exchange email, contacts and calendar – focussing on the differences and shortcomings of the Mac. I’m updating it as I find more.

The major business news in Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard release is proper support for Microsoft Exchange. Until now, using Exchange’s mail, calendar and contact suite has been painful and deficient on a Mac – only Entourage worked, and badly. Conosco’s IT support service has tried hard to keep clients away from the experience…

And – a threat for Microsoft in Snow Leopard – Exchange support is free. The necessary desktop programs are built in so Mac users don’t have the fat expense of Outlook. (Factor this into a Mac vs Windows cost comparison and Microsoft is no longer clearly the cheaper option. MS can’t easily respond – Outlook is a key part of Office which is one of its greatest moneyspinners…)

So a breakthrough moment – but does it work? Here are my experiences using Mac Mail, iCal and Address with Exchange. NB this is a switcher’s guide – I’m comparing them with Outlook 2010 on Windows 7 and ignoring the (vast) majority of functionality that works fine on both platforms. If you see any more, let me know.

Calendar

The most complex area of Exchange – managing multi-user invites causes havoc with every piece of desktop software that’s tried to work with them (except Outlook; most smartphones including the iPhone use MS Activesync and manage fine).

iCal is very slick to use and falls short only in some minor areas. Should be fine for most people.

iCal cons

  1. When you invite groups of people (e.g. ‘Sales’) to an event, iCal shows them only in rolled up form; Outlook allows you to unroll them and see the status of the individuals in a group.
  2. When you add a person to an event and ‘autopick’ the next available time for a meeting with them, iCal assumes that they are unavailable after working hours; Outlook let’s you schedule evening meetings.
  3. iCal shows other people’s busy time as ‘busy’ in the availability picker window; Outlook tells you what they’re doing (as long as you have permission to see their calendar and the event isn’t marked ‘private’). However iCal let’s you view their calendars overlaid on yours with all the non-private details.
  4. iCal doesn’t have categories for events, but you can have different calendars (work, home, etc) which provides a different way to achieve a similar effect.
  5. iCal doesn’t seem to understand ‘new time proposals’ – when an invitee reponds with a different time for a meeting. You can see the proposed time in the email you get, but you have to manually change the meeting.

iCal pros

  1. Multiple calendars – you can overlay work and personal calendars from Exchange, Apple, Google, Yahoo! and more, allowing you to manage complex family lives more efficiently. Exchange and Outlook don’t let you do this. (I don’t have personal experience of this, but plenty of people seem to make it work.)

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Sep 01 2009
Technology

British small businesses head for the clouds

Surprisingly strong support for web applications in general and especially Google Apps from a survey of UK small businesses.

  • 71% aware of Google Apps
  • 13% intend and 22% are considering switching to Google Apps – as many as have decided not to switch
  • 62% prefer to have business apps work through a browser
  • 32% use firefox as default browser
  • 8% intend to upgrade to W7

The survey covered 1400 Microsoft customers, so we have to assume it’s a representative sample of our small businesses. If so, these are astonishing numbers. Google Apps is immature and buggy (though sometimes impressive) and is far from a direct replacement for MS Office, but it’s clearly made itself widely known and seduced many (including Conosco – we use, resell and offer our IT support services for it).

The number preferring web apps suggests that the browser-based computing team has won already, and the high use of Firefox suggests a maturity in their users (MS’s Internet Explorer was awful for web apps until the very recent release of IE8).

These would be bad enough for MS – which is still pushing desktop apps, with browser apps for occasional light use – but the W7 uptake is dreadful. Ironically, upgrading to W7 is clearly the right course – it’s far better than its predecessors Vista and XP.

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Jul 14 2009
Technology

Microsoft attacks Google with free Office apps

Microsoft has announced details of Office 2010. Techcrunch has a complete guide – highlights include

  • Free web versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel, with stripped-down functionality (but more than Google’s apps)
  • Three screens strategy allows the apps to synchronise across phone, browser and desktop
  • Word allows multiple users to work on a document at the same time (not available with the web version)
  • Thread view for email messages in Outlook (about time)

We’ll hold judgement until we’ve actually tried the apps, but it looks good enough to defend some of Fortress Office, though Google has clearly undermined some of the walls and may still have the edge in some areas

  • Real-time document collaboration is a huge advancement. In Google’s spreadsheet app, this feature alone outweighs many of MS Office’s fancy functions in usefulness. MS appears to be lagging.
  • Most people use only a tiny fraction of MS Office’s features, so the free web versions may be sufficient for a large chunk of the userbase – hitting MS’s revenues hard.
  • MS’s software + services (i.e. desktop and web-based) is a potential winner for heavier users of Office – you can do the complex work on a desktop, and fall back on the browser for convenience. For instance, Google spreadsheets are hopelessly slow with large datasets and models.

UPDATE: Wired has had a better look

  • Web-Excel will allow real-time collaboration but the web versions of Word and PowerPoint won’t (for now)
  • Mac Office users won’t be able to use the integration between desktop and web apps until the new Mac version of Office appears (2011?)
  • MS’s strategy appears – unsurprisingly – to be to make the desktop apps essential and the web apps a useful appendage. For instance, it appears that you have to create documents with the desktop apps; you can then do simple editing with the web apps.

If this last point is true, MS are trying to seize the horns of the innovator’s dilemma – when someone overtakes your innovation (we won’t dwell on that point), do you continue with the old or switch to the new? MS might be trying to do both. Given inertia in the market, they might succeed.

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May 14 2009
1 Comment
Conosco, Technology

Google Apps 30,000, MS Office 0

Google Apps just won the Valeo account (with 30,000 users) for document storage and editing, with mail and calendars to follow later in the year. That’s a lot of lost revenue for Microsoft Office and Exchange… and MS’s web-based Office applications are still not even in beta.

Google are naturally crowing -

This deployment across Valeo’s distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents demonstrates the vast scalability of Google Apps. Whether your company has just five employees in a single room, or tens of thousands of people scattered around the globe, Google Apps can easily provide powerful messaging and collaboration tools.

Despite its bugs and shortcomings, Google Apps is using the recession to oust Microsoft with a stripped-down service that does just enough.

At Conosco, we’ve seen a sudden pick-up in new customers since March – and many are startups using Google Apps, which we’re happy to support.

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