Google Apps in the Real Office

Google Apps is a set of office productivity tools from the ever expanding Mountain View investment bank named Google. Google Apps comes with Gmail for email, Google Calendar for scheduling and Google Docs for writing documents, creating spreadsheets and making presentations. These can all be accessed online through any modern browser, although they work best through Google's Chrome browser. From an IT service delivery perspective the most interesting feature is Postini, a fully featured hosted spam filter which combines with Gmail to offer a full replacement to Microsoft Exchange. Postini allows all of the standard email controls to be put in place such as automatically adding footers to outgoing emails. The mail and calendar applications integrate with Blackberry Enterprise Servers meaning that existing Blackberry smart phones can be used without any degradation in security.

All of these combine to produce a powerful suite of tools which do quite a lot of what Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange do but with two major and obvious differences: firstly, Google Apps is designed to be used online rather than on a standard desktop computer and secondly that Google Apps is significantly cheaper. Google describes Google Apps as a set of "web-based communication, collaboration and security apps" rather than a suite of office tools. This means that they are not pitching Apps as a direct competitor to Microsoft Office or Open Office, but the intent is clear - particularly as Google is working towards the ability to work on Google Apps without being connected to the internet.

The first of these differences, that Google Apps is designed to be used online, requires consideration of access and security. If the internet connection to an office using Google Apps goes down, then users will not be able to get any work done. Every hour of downtime would come with a cost to the entire company. While this sounds like a major problem it isn't actually as negative towards Google Apps as it seems. If the internet connection to an office goes down, then that is a major business problem no matter which office suite is used; a lack of email and internet access would cripple most companies.

The other access problem comes if Google Apps becomes unavailable for a period. No service can guarantee 100% uptime, and eventually through incompetence or bad luck Google Apps will be unavailable for a period of time. The real question is whether an office based solution would be any better. Google has data centres spread around the world and has the money and expertise to throw at any problem it encounters. Most offices have an IT support team numbering in the single digits, and tight resources. Using Google Apps would means that the IT Manager will not be running around if the email system goes down (as Google will be dealing with the problem), and that downtime will occur much less frequently.

The second obvious consideration is the security aspects of moving to an internet hosted office suite - only specifically authorised users should be able to access their files from anywhere. Straight out of the box, Google Apps lets any user connect from anywhere, an IT manager's nightmare. Google Apps doesn't deal with this directly, but the various methods of signing in do provide solutions to this problem, as a single sign in solution for office computers would allow access only from specific accounts.

Without any bulk licensing, a full, individual, transferable license for Microsoft Office Professional 2007 costs around £350 with VAT; a one year, transferable, individual subscription to Google Apps costs £37.95 with VAT. Microsoft releases a new version of Office roughly every three years, so to keep up with the latest version of Microsoft Office requires an investment of £115 per year. Google updates its Apps suite automatically, so as technology advances updates are automatically available.

Using Google Apps has hard cost savings of £75 per year, per user. If £20 of this was diverted into training, an office of 50 people would have a training budget of £1,000 per year to help with the transition to Google Apps, whilst still slashing the IT operations budget by £2,750 per year. This is without considering the savings of not buying Microsoft Exchange and the less obvious cost of using Microsoft Office - time spent on support.

The main advantages of Google Apps are that it does a lot of simple things very simply, does some complex things very simply and has an extremely low total cost of ownership (TCO). The main advantages of Microsoft Office are that it does a lot complex things (but in a very complex way) and that it is familiar to every user. The real question for whether to use Google Apps versus Microsoft Office is one of need. Ninety percent of Microsoft's Office suite will never be used by people with it installed. Some users need the ability to do mail merges but no user actually needs Word Art. Some users need to be able to play multimedia in their presentations, but no user actually needs the ability to make their slides swoop in from different corners. No user, anywhere, actually needs Microsoft Access.

Is Google Apps a better alternative to Microsoft Office than other office suites such as Open Office? Yes. Should Google Apps completely replace Microsoft Office? Not yet. Could it replace Microsoft Office for 95% of users? Almost certainly. Seriously consider Google Apps for your environment.

If you have any questions about areas not covered (e.g. compliance, collaboration between sites or backups) please leave a comment below.