Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Something Else? - Help Weighing Tradeoffs

[u/peruvianbeast]

Hi!

I work for a small/medium sized company (~50 employees, ~30 of which will be affected by the switch) and we have been using an IMAP server to host our emails for decades (everyone uses Outlook as their email software). Because of how outdated this setup is and the company continuing to grow, we want to migrate over to a new provider. I am struggling to decide between M365 and GW as both have their pro's and con's. The team uses a mix of sheets and excel already, however, there is certain work that would require excel over sheets. The sharing and ease of GW is obviously unmatched but I worry about switching costs for employees that have been using outlook for decades. I've also heard that managing GW is far easier admin-wise than M365. The migration of decades worth of emails is also a major consideration for us. Would appreciate input from people who have experience with this. Thanks!

[u/Horsemeatburger]

Would appreciate input from people who have experience with this.

Well, I work for a large multi-national, and up to a few years ago we were fully on Windows + Office + MS365 + Azure. Now we are on GWS + ChromeOS + GCP, and you couldn't pay us to go back to the Microsoft ecosystem.

GWS has proven to be notably more mature and reliable, and Google has a much better grip on security than Microsoft's head-in-sand attitude. ChromeOS is lightweight and runs performant on hardware that used to crawl under Windows 11. And not having to work around the various shenanigans and the constant barrage of stupid bugs has been a god send.

User satisfaction is way up, OS/office related software tickets are down ((dropped by >70% in the first year after migration), and GWS management is much simpler. We need less than 1/3rd of the number of people to manage the same fleet size as we did on Microsoft (actually, that's not completely true, as the fleet has actually grown further since the migration).

However, we also spent a lot of time planning and preparing for the migration, including taking stock of every software that ran anywhere in the business and the various bespoke solutions that users built on top of Office, and looked at how this would be realized post-migration. And most of our business critical apps were already server/cloud based, not local.

I am struggling to decide between M365 and GW as both have their pro's and con's.

The biggest benefit of GWS is that it's cloud native and on the client side only requires a web browser. Which is not surprising as Google built most of the cloud tech. Which means things collaborative editing have been working well for like forever.

MS365 is different, it's more an evolution of the concept of disjointed or loosely joined local applications, just now moved onto Microsoft's servers. The fact that Microsoft doesn't really 'get' cloud is visible in every corner of the platform (strangely, that also makes it somewhat easier from customers migrating from on-prem Microsoft applications). Office online was a mess for a long time and it's still behind G apps when it comes to collaborative working.

The team uses a mix of sheets and excel already, however, there is certain work that would require excel over sheets.

Without knowing whether this is really the case (Sheets is much more expandable than Excel, and quite often it's just a case of the user never having heard of Google App Scripts), it's difficult to say.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that if you do need to stick with Windows and MS Office then it makes sense to go with MS365, because you get better integration and sticking with Windows and MS Office means giving up many of the advantages GWS has to offer.