Google now offers Google Workspace Essentials (formerly G Suite Essentials), providing a solution for users of Outlook or Office whose teams want to use Google Meet and Google Apps without needing to involve a personal gmail account. Google Workspace Essentails includes Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs, as well as Google Meet, Google Drive, Forms, Sites, and Keep, in a bundle minus a gmail account.
Basic Essentials supports (via Meet) meetings with up to 150 participants, and Google Drive with…
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Microsoft 365 Business Premium
Score 8.8 out of 10
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An integrated solution, designed for small or medium-sized businesses, bringing together the productivity of Microsoft Office with advanced security capabilities to help
safeguard data from external threats and help protect against data leaks.
With Microsoft 365 Business Premium, users can empower employees to be productive
anywhere on any device. Get more done with AI built into the Office apps. Work
better together with a hub for teamwork bringing your tools and people together
in one place.…
I will state this with 2 basic examples, When I require documentation to be edited by many editors then Google workspace is the way to go. It provides the best synching capabilities and also sharing capabilities. In case of meeting conduction through google meet a notes section would be awesome for personal notes and the capability to record the meetings would also help a ton to improve the productivity of all users
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is well suited to any size organization and is a must-have for business purposes. It is a vital component for the majority of work software needs, as the Microsoft 365 Business Premium package has apps to handle needs that I didn't know we had. It is a great way to provide the required software programs to teams, especially those that work remotely due to the great sharing capabilities built into it. Furthermore, the nonprofit program provided our small nonprofit with vital components for our remote work, while allowing us to keep our donated funds going directly to our mission.
The only thing that is a bit cumbersome is that it doesn't seem that you can save files directly to programs like one drive if you aren't using a Microsoft program to generate the document. An example of this would be if I am working in a PDF in our PDF Program I have to first save it to my desktop and then drag it into one drive. I end up with duplicates and that can sometimes make it hard to remember which is the most up-to-date.
Now that our department has used G Suite Essentials for close to 2 years, I can't imagine not using it. It has proven to be a very practical tool for sharing files / folders on a shared drive. It also makes it easy to modify and update content. It is user friendly and the interface is simple.
Google Workspace is very easy to use. Even the advanced features are also rendered with an intuitive user interface. Opting into new features is easy, with a clear indication of whether they cost extra or free. Communications about new features as well as security threats are easy to understand and follow up on.
The basic apps are straightforward and easy to use, especially since they have been around so long. I'm referring to the basic apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. Other features such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint Sites, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint Groups, etc. all require a higher level of knowledge to both implement and use properly
In the last 5 years, Microsoft has come a long way. The performance of the products has become more and more user-friendly and it seems that the feedback provided by the user community is being listened to and worked on. The processes are very fast and seamless. There are negligible errors and doesn't slow the systems down.
As mentioned elsewhere in the review, Microsoft has historically paid attention to community feedback and issues, but timeliness can improve, and so can the addressing of long-standing issues about which many users have said "I have this issue too!" but no official solution exists. For issues that do have a solution, however, the solution is usually not difficult to find, and the explanation of features on Microsoft's website can mitigate many problems.
Google Workspace Essentials is more robust than Dropbox with the other features that are available. Google Workspace Essentials is very comparable to Microsoft 365, and we ultimately went with Google because at the time, it was free/priced better than MS, and now we have lots of legacy files already stored on Google servers, so a switch would be too time-consuming. We went with Google Workspace Essentials over OpenOffice because of the email features of using Google.
We selected Microsoft 365 Business Premium as it provides a better integration that aligns better with the needs of our company. Another obvious plus is that our staff was used to Microsoft Office so switching to Microsoft 365 Business Premium offered an almost seamless transition. The addition of Team and the SharePoint libraries sealed the deal as we were able to migrate our entire infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud thereby simplifying administration, backups and ultimately reducing costs.
