Office 365/Office 2010 products have a very familiar look. Both are more than suitable for large enterprises when considering that advanced presentations is often left to experienced designers, not productivity suite users.
Probably the biggest disparity amongst applications is Excel, is the clear differentiating factor, due to most users being much more acquainted with formulas and the idea that Spread sheets’ cell selection and formula editor is just awful.
Google Apps Forms helps to make up for its lacking in the spread sheet department. Google clearly understands the need for validated data entry. However, one can achieve the same effect (validated form data entry) with SharePoint Online. SharePoint is a more professional approach to this, with backend database support, hence the non-suitable mark for Google Apps.
Google’s Drawing application was most likely created for users restricted to a single web browser or Chromebook. Similar to Microsoft’s Paint program with a few extra features.
OneNote is probably one of the most underrated – underutilized – applications on the market. If it ever catches on, it could potentially replace the majority of work once done on word processors, as it offers more ideal means to organize disparate information. The interface is almost a spitting image of the Office 2013 desktop version.
Google has real-time collaboration on everything except forms. Furthermore, the means for collaboration, a color-coded legend listing each collaborating user at the top right of your screen that corresponds to highlighted entries on the document, is simple yet highly effective.
Office Web Apps also has near real-time collaboration with the added bonus of allowing desktop users to connect with users in the cloud. However, changes aren’t seen until a co-authoring user saves changes to the document. Furthermore, changes are limited to access controlled objects or areas of a document.
Google might get better marks here for simplicity or ease-of-use. Also, an asterisk might be appropriate under the Office 365 App/Service column as different limitations on co-authoring exist for each Office Web Apps application.
Google only supports offline editing for Document docs and spread sheets on the Chrome browser only, while Office 365 supports Office Web Apps in its entirety. Office 365 offline editing is also facilitated by the provision of local Office apps by Microsoft as part of the subscription price (applicable to Office 365 Small Business Premium, Office 365 Midsize Business, and E3/E4 plans)
Ironically, Google has a product called Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office that “brings collaborative multi-person editing to the familiar Microsoft® Office experience” and allows a user to sync their Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents with Google Apps. Office 365 supports Office Web Apps in its entirety.
Office Web Apps allows you to access files from your Skydrive library or team site, while Google Apps takes some getting used to (just as Gmail did with its labeling system). Office Web Apps has better right-click/shortcut menu navigation though. Both Google and Microsoft offer a search bar but Google has the ability to attach documents to multiple folders that aren’t necessarily part of the same folder hierarchy, so I’d say Google Apps is the better of the two options. On the other hand though, both might be said to be a distance from being suitable for large enterprise environments. SharePoint Online might tip the scales in favour of Office 365 in this respect.
Manual importing and exporting of documents for both services are fairly straightforward, and they both provide related storage capabilities (Drive for Google and Skydrive for Microsoft) where documents can be kept. Both have good drag-and-drop features and the ability to import multiple files and even entire folders. Migration of large file systems might be tricky for either service, which is why they may not be suitable for large enterprises.
Both have pretty decent features for both viewing and restoring revision history. However, both fail to support CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), which makes them bad candidates for large enterprises.
