Office 365 or Google? CTO Mark Ridley explains why he chose different options at different firms

Blenheim Chalcot group CTO Mark Ridley explains why he went with Microsoft at AVADO, despite his preference for Google

Most people that know me are well aware that I have a strong personal preference for Google's G Suite over Microsoft's Office 365. Why then, did we choose Office 365 at [digital learning provider] AVADO?

Despite my preference, my job isn't to implement what I like, but rather to do what's best for the company as a whole. When I joined AVADO in 2016, there was already a strong and successful legacy of Microsoft use - on-premise Exchange, Windows and SQL servers and a team of .NET developers and Microsoft administrators. We had also already begun a mammoth migration of those Exchange servers to Office 365.

Did these factors mean that the choice was already obvious, based on our past decisions? Far from it, in fact. Within AVADO there are a number of staunch Google evangelists, and rightly so. Our company vision was not just to implement technology, but to give an outstanding and consistent user experience to all of our global users. Even after the Office 365 migration was complete in the summer of 2017, we continued discussions about a second migration, this time to the Google stack.

How did the two compare?
The Microsoft stack has undergone considerable improvement since the last time I compared the two options. The integration between the Office applications and the online services has become tighter; online, collaborative document editing is now actually possible, having been a painful experience as recently as the beginning of 2017. There is a fizzing pace of improvement in the Office stack, particularly online, that is great to see.

In terms of individual products, one of the most compelling additions has been Microsoft Teams, and this was a key cost consideration for AVADO. Whilst there was sporadic and enthusiastic use of Slack (in addition to Skype for Business), our investment in security and compliance (especially ISO27001) meant that ‘free' Slack had to go. Until Google Hangouts Chat sees the light of day, Teams is a compelling component of the Microsoft stack, with some powerful document sharing and calendar integrations.

In a similar vein, we had a vision of rolling out a collaborative, knowledge sharing intranet. We wanted to broadcast team news, executive blogs and company success stories as well as FAQs and policies. Previously this has been a mire of on-premise SharePoint administration, but the new SharePoint Online ‘Modern' theme, and particularly the ‘Communication Sites' has proved to be a lightweight, and ‘good enough' option. The fact that this is all included in the Office 365 licence made a compelling cost argument.

Given that we had started migrating our Windows infrastructure to Microsoft Azure with the Exchange migration, and continued our growth on Azure with the test and development environments for our engineering team, there was also value and simplicity in sharing the infrastructure (and administration) between Office 365 and Azure.

It goes without saying that the user rollout and training of Office 365 to existing Windows and Office users is more straightforward than a move to G Suite, which necessarily entails training users in the narrower feature set of Docs, Sheets and Slides. Given the sheer amount of transformation that AVADO was undertaking in 2017, the importance of managing and limiting change was a key decision point.

There were several other positives about the Microsoft stack that we took into consideration. Power BI is increasingly becoming a useful business tool, the speed of development in the whole Microsoft ecosystem is distinctly impressive - we noticed massive improvement not only in Office 365, SharePoint and Azure, but also in tools like Microsoft Dynamics 365, which we considered as a CRM.

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Office 365 or Google? CTO Mark Ridley explains why he chose different options at different firms

Blenheim Chalcot group CTO Mark Ridley explains why he went with Microsoft at AVADO, despite his preference for Google

Overall, then, in a year of huge change we chose the option which posed less of a challenge to our end users, based on a solid set of features and a strong integration with other products we were using. It also leveraged our previous investments in both technology and people.

But, we still very nearly chose to use G Suite instead.

The simplicity of Google, the frustrations with Microsoft
I started this piece with a reference to my personal preference for the Google tools, and I can summarise this preference down to two things; focus and simplicity. Google's tools, when used wholeheartedly, are consistent, collaborative and every feature is complete and valuable.

The Microsoft ecosystem carries with it a bewildering legacy and complexity. Whether it is the backwards compatibility of the Windows applications, the confusion between OneDrive and Sharepoint or the array of seemingly random tools presented in the Office portal (Bookings? Business Center? Planner?), the one thing that clearly differentiates Microsoft from Google is a consistency of vision.

As a wonderful example of this, take OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and Sharepoint. Microsoft have a clear steer on how to store files: if you are storing documents that you are working on personally (at work, that is), you should use OneDrive for Business. If you want to regularly collaborate on these documents you should store the documents in SharePoint. Explaining this nuance to someone in IT is hard enough; explaining it to a harried sales executive who has more important things to worry about than file hierarchy is awful

Let's take this confusion further. Is SharePoint a file store, a collaboration tool or an Intranet? Should I use Skype for Business or Teams? Do I post links in OneNote within Teams, or on Yammer? Even within these tools, it's not uncommon to have two separate administrator interfaces, one old and one new.

It could be argued that this complexity offers choice, customisation and power. I still argue that it offers user confusion, training complexity, administration overhead and a version of analysis paralysis, caused by uncertainty around what tool to use in what context.

Another frustration of mine, hidden among that array of services in the Office Portal is Microsoft Flow. Quick and easy Business Process Automation (BPA) tools like Kissflow can make an enormous difference to the efficiency of small and medium enterprises. Flow has nearly all of the capacity of Kissflow, but then flubs the implementation into a slightly constipated version of IFTT. If Microsoft spent any time working inside their end user organisations, they may realise just what a huge opportunity they are almost offering. Almost, but not quite.

Google, on the other hand, just works. It feels what it is; a tool that is loved and used by the people that develop it. It's impossible to speak to a Googler without them recommending the move to G Suite, and I understand their evangelism. It takes quite a show of bravery to select G Suite in an organisation with a Microsoft legacy, and a thick skin to respond to Powerpoint users who believe that they'll be losing critical features in their presentations.

With either sufficient organisational buy-in, or a clean slate in a new business, there is still no doubt in my mind that I'd pick G Suite every time. Reality, however, is messier than that and on this occasion Microsoft just took the nod. For AVADO, however, there will always be more improvements to bring to our users, and it won't be long before the G Suite and Office 365 question is raised again.