Google Apps Vs Office 365 Software Officially Kicks
Google Apps Vs Office 365 Free For Everybody

Given the current economic situation, theres lots of incentive to rent only what you need, rather than buy enough to handle the heaviest workload.

There are also plenty of reasons to reduce the general level of expertise needed to keep your systems working.

But its by no means certain that the cloud can deliver in either department -- and perform in a secure, reliable way.

Can your company save money by paying Microsoft or Google to take on what youd otherwise attempt in-house What kinds of problems can you expect What benefits Will either of these solutions make sense for you, or is the grass always greener on the cloudy side InfoWorlds Galen Gruman tested Office 365 on mobile devices, Macs, and Linux; see where it works.

Get the no-nonsense explanations and advice you need to take real advantage of cloud computing in InfoWorld editors 21-page Cloud Computing Deep Dive PDF special report.

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Office 365 is meant to be used with a locally installed version of Office (preferably Office 2010), whereas Google Apps lives 100 percent in the browser.

To use a hackneyed metaphor, were talking apples and oranges.

With so many feature variables between the two products, blanket pronouncements dont make a lot of sense.

Google Apps Vs Office 365 Software Officially Kicks

Nonetheless, with the production release of Office 365, the cloud era of desktop productivity software officially kicks into high gear.

Office 365 works with Microsofts Web App versions of desktop Office applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote -- so theoretically, you can use it without a locally installed version of Office at all.

The real Office 365 ploy is this: Sick of maintaining Exchange and SharePoint servers No problem.

Pay Microsoft and it will run those servers for you -- and throw in the fancy new Lync communications server.

Office 365 represents the first time Microsoft has bundled desktop software ( Office 2010 ) with an online service into a single subscription-based offering.

Google Apps isnt a colossal, all-encompassing environment like Office 365 or its predecessor Microsoft BPOS (Business Productivity Online Standard Suite).

Its intended to be small and light and to hit the high points.

Google Apps includes Google Docs for word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, forms, and data storage; Gmail and Calendar, which youve probably used before; a website-building utility called Sites; a spam filter called Postini; and a video-sharing app.

When you pay for Google Apps, you pay for the programs that let you manage an unlimited number of email accounts on your domain, 25GB of space on each mail account, and for phone support of varying quality.

Google Apps Vs Office 365 Free For Everybody

All the rest of the Google bundle is free for everybody, all the time.

So for practical purposes, if youre offline, youre out of luck.

Overall, comparing Office 365 to Google Apps is like comparing the QE II to a sailboat.

Both of them will get you over the water, but they do it in completely different ways -- especially on the server side.

To dig deep into the online versions of Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010, see InfoWorlds Office 365 preview; little has changed since then.) If you revel in the intricacies of Exchange Server 2010, youll be happy to know that all of that power and complexity carries through to the Microsoft-hosted version, although theres a simplified interface sitting on top.

Google Apps Vs Office 365 For Mac