Collaboration tools are meant to make working together even easier for your team. Unfortunately, not all collaboration tools are equal in their utility. As the experts, we’re weighing in on what’s good to train your team on and what’s best left out of the equation.
This month we’re comparing Google’s collaborative offering “G Suite” with Microsoft’s juggernaut, “Office 365”. The below table identifies the main differences between the two collaborative tools, with emphasis on the most popular business plans.
| G Suite | Office 365 | |||
| Basic | Business | Business | Enterprise E3 | |
| Pricing | $5/month | $10/month | $10/month | $20/month |
| Storage Size | 30 GB | Unlimited | 1 TB | 1 TB |
| Email Access | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Custom Email Domain | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Shared calendar | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Number of devices | Unlimited | Unlimited | 5 phones, 5 tablets & 5 PC’s | 5 phones, 5 tablets & 5 PC’s |
| Video chat | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Downloadable desktop apps | No | No | Yes | Yes |
G Suite
Teams can use the G Suite of applications to share work and track projects together. A document created by one user can be contributed to by anyone in the team who it is shared with. Similarly, other applications have this same feature. This enables the team to comment, collaborate and track who has done what. The cloud nature of G Suite means that the team can collaborate even if they are on opposite sides of the world.
One of the main benefits of G Suite is the simple single sign-on process; everything is accessible in one space rather than signing in to multiple applications every day. In addition, communication is made easy with Google Hangout, which allows colleagues to chat, call, and video call without using a different program. Lastly, one of the best features of G Suite is the real-time saving process, which eliminates the risk of losing documents.
Office 365
Office 365 is the same suite of tools that your team uses every day but with the flexibility of being accessible from anywhere with a reliable internet connection. This makes it even easier for a team to share working documents, comment, mark-up and track changes so everyone is across a project.
The benefit of Office 365 is having desktop applications in addition to cloud access. All of the applications can integrate with each other, which results in more efficient processes. Office 365 also contains more complex application features, which is helpful for more comprehensive businesses. For example, Microsoft Outlook allows user to build tables in emails, and this can be helpful while compiling complicated messages.
Which tool is better for your business, G Suite or Office 365?
Both have great features which enable and support good collaborative practices. G Suite offers great cloud and collaborative services for a geographically diverse team and for businesses with irregular hours. This option is great for smaller, dynamic businesses.
Office 365 brings what everyone is already familiar with the cloud, adding great features such as cloud storage and collaborative tools such as yammer. It also allows businesses to download desktop versions of each application in addition to cloud storage, whereas G Suite is a cloud-only system.
There is a bit of setup required for each option, but that’s where we come in. If your business is ready for the flexibility that cloud collaboration provides, contact Rule Technology today on 1300 823 226 to discuss which option would work best for you.
