Outlook vs Google, A Case Study
Microsoft has generally dominated the business market with products like Microsoft Office and Outlook. Outlook has been a particularly successful product for Microsoft, giving users an all-in-one package for managing email, contacts, and appointments, with the added benefit of integrating seamlessly with other Microsoft products.
Long-time Outlook users love the features built in, and consequently are reluctant to switch to any competitive products, including G-mail.
We at DBS>Interactive, however feel the opposite is true. Here’s why and exactly how we’ve made the switch to Google.
Why:
- Significant cost savings
- Google Apps integrates painlessly with other platforms of YOUR choice
- Data sharing makes collaborating less complicated
- Fewer headaches – we don’t have to deal with all those mysterious Microsoft errors.
The savings includes the obvious; the license cost for the full version of Outlook ($100+ ea), the monthly fee for Exchange server ($15 ea), and the monthly Blackberry Enterprise server plan (another $15 ea). Add all of those fees up and you are left an annual fee of $360.
A Premiere Google Apps account is $50 per year, and includes perks Outlook can’t offer. The mailboxes are remarkably larger and email can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection. The freedom to access your data how you want and where you want, without worrying about licenses and installation issues, is itself, a great value.
One continuous irritation for us has been scheduling and sharing of calendars. Not all employees have Outlook, which obviously complicates things. Microsoft creates needless hurdles for calendar sharing in Outlook, and it is impossible to do with Outlook Express. Before we made the transition to Google, we were able to only share calendars effectively among a few, and for very limited items. Now, we have company calendars, department calendars, and personal calendars. All of which can be shared effortlessly. Even nicer, no special software is required. A huge productivity enhancement for us!
Not only is calendar information easier to share, we have also put much of our internal business forms and documents in the Google “cloud”. Again, easy sharing of this information has made us more efficient and saved us time and effort. We can collaborate in real time on documents no matter where we are physically.
There are other savings that aren’t as easy to quantify. For example, the inevitable tech support issues that come part and parcel with Microsoft products, or lost productivity due to having to reboot because “something weird keeps happening”, or applying security updates, or re-installing…shall I continue? Moving to the Google cloud has largely eliminated all these nuisances.
And this is how we made the switch:
- Migrated mailboxes from hosted Exchange environment to Gmail
- Migrated calendar data from Outlook to Google Calendar
- Moved various forms and internal business documents from an internal server to the Google cloud
- Traded in our Blackberries for Androids
Google has various tools for migrating mailboxes and calendars, and moving documents from a local file server to Google Docs. This took a little time, but overall, was relatively painless. And the move from Blackberry to Android was a no-brainer. Android being a Google product, integrates with all Google services out of the box.
As much as we crow about our Google transition, we must admit the steepness of the learning curve. Some details definitely work differently and we’ve had to adjust here and there. We still have yet to eliminate Microsoft altogether, though we have immensely reduced the dependency, saved a handful of dollars, and improved our business systems.
