What would it take to get your boss to move to office 365?
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This reminds me - I recently had a conversation with a FTSE 250 that's considering moving to Office 365. It's being debated at present. They have the internal skillset and infrastructure needed for in-house Exchange, but are looking at streamlining and reducing IT complexity in general. I'm interested in seeing which way they go with it.
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@Nara said:
There are plenty of users that get clogged up with their email. They're the ones with thousands of things in their inbox and a fair chunk of them are unread. Offer them help by being there to teach them how to manage email, and if they take you up on it, even later on, it's a win. If they don't, they'll just drown in email, miss important things, and have their careers suffer because of it.
Having worked at a major Wall St. financial firm, 14,000 emails per day, per person is what they actually sent. Having a thousand in your inbox is what you faced just for having stepped away for lunch. SMBs rarely deal with that kind of volume but as companies get larger it is more and more common. But even in NTG which is quite small I get around 400 per day.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I'd be interested to hear about the working practices of anyone who gets anywhere near a 50GB mailbox. My biggest bugbear is probably when someone sends an Excel spreadsheet as an attachment to 20 different users, instead of just linking to it - things can quickly get out of control. Email can be the enemy of collaboration.
It is 25GB typically. And rarely do people approach it.
50GB according to Microsoft's website. My e-mail is a mess, but I'm pretty good at using Search, so not really a problem.
OK, given hosted e-mail is a no-brainer, there are 3 options:
- Office 365
- Google Apps for Business
- A.N. Other
You all seem keen on 1. Anyone using, or have good/bad experiences of, Google? I'm off to spend the day at their new Soho offices next week (http://www.stylist.co.uk/life/we-love-googles-new-london-hq-designed-by-penson-studios) and would like a bit of background to the advantages and disadvantages. The main one is that Microsoft Office is very good, though that is partly just because it's what I'm familiar with. I'm not sure I'd want to give it up. My brother's company is seriously considering Google at the moment - I think they have about 500 users and several IT staff, so the savings would be pretty large potentially.
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Obviously you can still use Microsoft Office with Google, but I don't see the point. If you want to stick with Office, you're always better off using Office 365 for e-mail. Google Apps only makes financial sense if you're going "all in". Mix and matching products from Microsoft and Google doesn't really work.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
50GB according to Microsoft's website. My e-mail is a mess, but I'm pretty good at using Search, so not really a problem.
Really? That must have just increased. I've not seen that yet.
You are correct, though, I looked and they have silently doubled the amount of storage that they provide at the entry level tiers (top tier was always unlimited.) That's great, and it highlights why storage limits are not a big deal - because as people use more, the amount available grows. Google does the same thing, slowly expanding the available storage over time. It used to just be 1GB, then 10GB then 25GB and it appears that 50GB is the next increment. We expect that this will just keep growing because it is a cheap way for the providers to compete with each other (expanding the cap doesn't double their storage needs, it barely affects them as almost no one uses the additional storage.)
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@scottalanmiller said:
OK, given hosted e-mail is a no-brainer, there are 3 options:
- Office 365
- Google Apps for Business
- A.N. Other
The only good #3 that I've seen is Rackspace. Fewer features than the other two but very, very enterprise at a fraction of the cost. It's really unbeatable. Starting price is half that of Hosted Exchange and the service is excellent.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
You all seem keen on 1. Anyone using, or have good/bad experiences of, Google?
Most businesses today clamour for Exchange and so Office 365 becomes the "go to" email answer. We, at NTG, use the full suite of tools and that really takes Office 365 to the next level and makes it freaking amazing. As a consultancy we speak to tons of businesses and the rate at which people want Exchange and/or Outlook vs. any other option is so extreme that recommending Office 365 becomes second nature. But it is certainly not the only excellent option.
Little ad copy here but... at NTG we are specifically partners with all three... Office 365, Google Apps and Rackspace Apps so that we can remain as neutral as possible for customers to whom we consult while still being able to supply their hosted email needs (long ago we were a hosted email vendor ourselves.) We selected those three as partners because we felt that they covered every reasonable email need for 99% of all hosted email customers and that it would be unreasonable to try to cover that last 1% of niche email needs. We love all three of them and recommend different ones at different times (NTG uses Office 365 internally, but I use Rackspace for my home email and NTG was on Rackspace a few years ago and loved it.)
What we have found is that businesses gravitate to Office 365 regardless of what we recommend just due to the low price and big name. But we certainly try to remain neutral between those three.
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Google Apps are great. The biggest thing is the shift in ecosystem. Moving from anything to Google Apps requires a little bit of a learning curve, not just around the tools but around how you interact with IT in general. You move to Google Cloud hosting for your files, typically. If going down that road you want to also consider using Chromebooks and really dedicating to the platform. If you can go 100% Google, it's really hard to beat. But lots of shops don't want (or can't) be homogenous and that is where Google Apps are weak and where Office 365 and Rackspace Email play very heavily. But for shops that can do it and really make the switch and dedicated to the architecture, Google Apps is amazing. And amazingly simple.
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Well, I went to Google's new London HQ yesterday to spend the day viewing Google Apps. Firstly, I really didn't like the building. It was kind of brutalist in design - all bright colours and minimalism. Security was extremely tight, I'm guessing they're a potential target of anti-capitalist agitators. They had a lift system that I'm embarrassed to say completely flummoxed me! Having been to Microsoft's London HQ last year, I can definitely say it Microsoft 1 Google 0 on that score.
There was a talk by a couple of major Google users, one a large retailer and one a local government. The local government has replaced the majority of its XP PCs with Chromebooks - about 3000 users in all. However, it's really just using them as thin clients to access its Citrix farm, which I don't find very exciting. I mean Chromebooks are great thin clients, but it's a bit boring. The most interesting bit was that all these devices are connecting over WiFi, they've largely got rid of their LAN. They're hoping to start using Google Apps more, but it appeared more of a hope than an expectation at this stage - we all know how long legacy applications can remain in use. Similarly, when people started grilling the retailer, it was clear they still rely massively on Microsoft products for all their LOB applications. Overall, it gave me the impression that Google can work in certain parts of your business for certain specific applications - it complements your existing Microsoft environment, but doesn't (as yet) replace it.
They were pushing their Chromebox video conferencing package a lot. $1000 to purchase, which gives you a webcam, a remote control, and a Chromebox, and $250 a year maintenance. This compares well with traditional conferencing setups, obviously, but we use Skype and GoToMeeting all the time now and it's dirt cheap and works pretty well. They didn't demonstrate the advantages of Google over these applications. We then had a complete demo of Google apps. It's ok. It does the job. My biggest criticism is that it doesn't look very nice. Aesthetics matters to me, but I guess they don't to everyone. The worry for me is that if your users are used to using beautifully designed third-party apps on the iPad (for example), trying to get them interested in an internal Google Site could be a hard sell. It just looks dated and boring. Anyone else feel like this, or just me? I want my users to feel this is the future - but it doesn't look like the future. The Google Site they demoed looked more like GeoCities circa 1999.
There was nothing much new that excited me. Sharing documents in the cloud, hosted e-mail, great search features, video conferencing, social media - these things excited me a couple of years ago, but now I'm kinda "yeah, so what? What new tricks do you have for me?" The noughties was an amazing decade, but it's 2014 now - what will this decade be remembered for? To be fair, they did do a talk on Google Maps which was pretty exciting, and I'll be doing some work on that in the next few weeks and hoping to wow our marketing team with some cool customer maps.
I guess I'm still a Microsoft fanboy (just.....). I do think it's fantastic that Microsoft has got some real competition. Having grown up during years of Microsoft dominance, I think it's really healthy to have a genuine alternative. If nothing else, I think Google and Apple have forced Microsoft to up their game, and I imagine a lot of the great things about O365 wouldn't have come about without such fierce competition. I've been in IT for over 20 years and I think this is the most exciting time I've experienced. So many great new toys to play with!
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I'm with you on Google Apps. It's a good product but it is very limited and doesn't have the look and feel of modern apps. I don't like using Gmail either. It's unnecessarily quirky and busy. Google doesn't make things as fun to use or as easy to use as they could.
I think that the Chromebook model is better than it seems. Only problem is is that businesses are struggling to adapt to it. But it is a business problem and failing, not a Google one. Google supplies the tools, business can't grok them.
In the same vein, the Linux world has everything businesses need and have for a decade or more and yet almost no businesses have cares to go down the 100% Linux path regardless of the massive savings and ease of use once the transition is over.
