How to Choose (and Max Out Your Investment in) a Productivity Suite
One of the first decisions you make as your business is getting established is what productivity platform to be on. For most of us, it’s a binary choice: Google Workspace or Microsoft Office. If you’re using Gmail already, or you’re a hardcore Excel person, it might seem like a no-brainer, but I encourage you to give the choice the thought it deserves. Once you’re on a platform, it’s not easy to migrate. (Ask me how I know.)
It’s easy to get distracted by trends or the last app you used that you liked. But as a business leader, the apps you choose affect the bottom line, employee motivation and data security. The costs for things like Dropbox, Slack, Evernote, etc., on TOP of your investment in Google Workspace or Microsoft Office add up fast and may not be delivering the value you hoped.
Let’s look at the core components and how they stack up. Then I’ll tell you a bit about our journey.
1. Cloud Storage & Web Pages
If you're a modern studio, you need cloud storage. Google Drive, part of Google Workspace, allows you to store, share, and collaborate on files with others, and Google Sites is a structured wiki and web page creation tool. Both are functional, collaborative and easy to use.
Microsoft Office offers OneDrive and SharePoint as alternatives, although comparing them to the Google apps is not apples to apples. OneDrive works great for individual storage but for collaboration is not as straightforward as Google Drive. SharePoint, which once required a server and a lot of specialized knowledge, is now available as SharePoint Online, and even though it’s based on a web page, it generally works better for collaborative cloud storage. But the sad truth is this: SharePoint Online is not stable for users that move around a lot (laptop or mobile device). We started Tee Lex all in on Office Online and soon learned that when we had users traveling or without a stable internet connection, version conflicts soon followed.
This is a common thread with Microsoft Office: the capability is massive but it’s so complex to use that sometimes it’s easier to just use something else, OR it isn’t reliable in the way that you hoped. In any case, OneDrive and SharePoint are powerful tools in the right context.
Google Drive can be difficult to adapt your thinking to; it’s not designed to mimic hard disk storage the way Dropbox, etc. are, but once you do we have found it to be extremely usable and stable. Google Sites does the job with a lot less complexity than SharePoint.
Either way, make sure that you’ve really exhausted all the capabilities of the cloud storage included in your productivity suite before you start paying for Dropbox, Box, etc. In most cases, you’ll find you are already paying for plenty of functionality.
2. Productivity Tools
Google Workspace and Microsoft Office both offer a classic suite of productivity tools that make it easy to collaborate on documents and provide feedback.
Google Workspace has Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, where Microsoft Office offers desktop and browser-based versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The browser-based “Office Online” apps don’t have quite as much functionality as their desktop siblings, but the desktop apps are more powerful and sophisticated than their Google equivalents. If you’re a Microsoft shop and your team tells you they just have to use Google Apps to collaborate, tell them to learn about Office Online.
Pro Tip: When collaborating in real time, use Office Online. It is more stable than the desktop apps and reduces lag time or version issues when syncing to the cloud.
If you integrate your tools with a lot of cloud apps, Google Workspace has a competitive advantage over Office, especially if your organization has a mix of Macs and PCs. Google Sheets especially seems to be more friendly and stable with API connections than Excel Online. Office desktop apps are more straightforward to use offline than Google Apps (although the functionality of Google Apps offline is perfectly fine).
For whiteboarding-type functionality, Google Workspace has Jamboard and Office has Whiteboard, both have tie-outs to different hardware options. Like with email (see below), both are good products, it’s a question of preferences. Unless you have some very specific need, I wouldn’t pay extra for Miro or Mural.
Office also features an entry-level version of Visio that I use all the time. No Lucid Chart subscriptions for us!
3. Chat, Video and Audio Conferencing, Email and Calendar
Google Workspace includes Gmail, which is a robust mail platform with excellent organization and search options. Gmail is closely connected to Google Calendar, which has all the functionality of modern time management.
Office offers Outlook for Email and Calendar and in my opinion Outlook and Google Mail & Calendar are equally matched, if different. I think the differences between them boil down to preferences, not capability. Office also includes Bookings, which helps with scheduling similar to Calendly.
Google Workspace features Meet and Chat, simple but powerful and well-integrated apps for text chat and video meetings. For an extra cost, Google also offers Google Voice, a VOIP (Voice Over IP) telephony service replacing old phone systems that includes SMS capability.
Microsoft offers Teams for text and video chat, and video meetings. It also has an optional (extra cost) telephony system which has a lot of powerful features, but it does not have SMS capability at the time of writing. Teams also offers a variety of other collaboration technology, including deep integrations with other Office and non-Office apps. I won’t lie, we tried using this functionality and found it worthless. I don’t know anyone who uses Teams for anything other than chat, meetings or phone (including inside Microsoft).
Both platforms offer plenty of functionality in this area, and both connect to a lot of functionality-extending plug-ins. I’d question the need to pay extra for Zoom, Slack, etc.
4. Notes & Task Management
Google Workspace and Microsoft Office both offer simple personal tasks lists available throughout the Suite (called Tasks on both). Both platforms also offer more advanced task and note-taking platforms for collaboration.
Google Workspace has Keep which is a basic notetaking or list-making app. Its inputs are limited to text, scribbles and small image files. It works but it’s basic (I use the personal version for my grocery list). Better than using Keep, Google Docs (their competitor to Word) has lots of tags and tools built-in for meeting notes, images and hot links to other files. It’s not the same as Microsoft’s OneNote but it’s easier to use and certainly more stable.
OneNote is much more powerful than either Keep or the tools in Docs, offering multiple levels of tag and virtually any kind of input. It’s a true competitor to Evernote.
Microsoft Office also features Planner, a lightweight project management system. It’s a big value-add to Office if your project management needs are basic. We pay extra for Asana and we couldn’t live without it.
5. Automation & everything else
Both platforms offer Forms for gathering surveys or other data and a variety of scripting and other automation tools, which are outside the scope of this post. Microsoft Office includes several other apps, but I don’t find any of them very useful.
Our Journey
Tee Lex started on Microsoft Office, but it wasn’t an easy decision. I liked the modern look and approach to organization of Gmail, and I like how Chat and Meet live in the same window.
When we started, Google Docs didn’t yet support Tables of Contents without a plugin, which for a company writing employee handbooks is just not a thing. I had a white-knuckle grip on Excel from my VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) past. I had a lot of familiarity with Outlook from my last two jobs. We also were able to buy Microsoft 365 from a reseller I had a past relationship with and having them handle our Tier 1 support was like having a free IT team.
Three years later, Google Apps have come a long way and the problems we had with Office have not changed one bit. I also realized - when having a lot of trouble sharing files with clients - that 100% of our customers were on Google Workspace.
And in a previous version of this post, I did write this:
There’s no Google equivalent for Access (lots of blog posts about replacing Access with Forms- which is ludicrous- notwithstanding).
To which I answer my past self: who cares? The last straw was when our reseller partner decided not to sell retail licensing anymore.
One problem I did not have a solution for, though, were the apps we had built on Azure. The Google equivalent would have required redevelopment, redeployment and would be more expensive to host.
So now we have both.
The team runs on Google Workspace for the day-to-day, and our custom development work and hosting continues to live in Azure. I still get to use Visio and use OneNote for file request links (sadly still not available in Google Workspace). But we have two licenses for Microsoft 365 and the rest are Google Business Starter which is a significant savings, ditto on Google Voice over Teams Phone (it was also much easier to set up).
This journey taught me a lot about both platforms, but my biggest takeaway is still this:
I ain’t paying for Dropbox!