Why companies choose Microsoft BPOS / Office 365 over Google Apps

Today, Computerworld published a good article by Shane O’Neill titled “Why We Chose Exchange Online, Not Google Apps”

The author of the article, based on customer testimonials, explains why Winston-Salem selected Microsoft hosted Outlook over Google Apps. While I have touched on this point many times over, for every business owner, it always comes down to three key criteria:

1. How familiar are my employees with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office applications vs. Gmail and Google Apps?
2. How much money have we already invested in Microsoft licenses, i.e. Microsoft Office, SharePoint, etc?
3. Extent of required end-user training we will have to provide to ensure that the solution is quickly adopted by all employees

As you can see, the selection process can be fairly simple and at times, majority of decision makers will favor a technology that their users are already familiar with, without looking at  feature and functionality, or even price tag.

It is important to remember, that choosing your cloud provider will have long-term effects on your business, and if your competitors selected a more agile, feature-reach collaboration platform, they may beat you at your own game. Hence, the selection process must include a much more detailed review and analysis of all pros and cons prior to making a commitment to a particular technology or vendor.

Until next time,

Steve Driz