Having read a few comparative reviews it is clear many people have their own opinions, thoughts and ideas of the two systems. Some reviewers seem to give the impression that they thought Micrososft would not reach Google’s standard of the ‘cloud’ experience of storing documents online, sharing and editing them with colleauges and other students.
Some have described Google’s offering as a more consumer product compared to Microsoft’s which can be orientated to almost anyone or any business large or small. Google does not offer such flexibility and has been described as one size fits all. However Microsoft offer a range of different plans and licences that are user specific and not machine specific. Which means that the organisation could save money in areas where some members of staff need very little and others need that bit more functionality.
Google does not offer a downtime promise in it’s SLA, which could work out badly should there be any major problem. Microsoft has pitched an agreement that should their downtime be any less 99.9% they will refund a percentage of the fees paid (upto a maximum of 100%, depending on the length of time the system has been unavailable for).
Google’s system from the outset was designed to be web based. The tools that Google produced are brilliantly integrated and were created just for the cloud. This somewhat differs to Microsoft’s offering, whereby one method offers purely access to their Web Apps (with limited functionality) or a compination of the Web Apps with the full desktop applications to give a full set of tools. This in my opinion is better, mainly due to the fact that they can back each other up. By this I mean should a network connection be unavailable users can still work on documents using the desktop applications.
More on this topic to come soon…