I have been looking at Google Apps versus Office 365. What we have learned
Google sites does not have the depth of features that Sharepoint online (part of Office 365) has. For instance - Sharepoint has native workflow, google apps offers workflow through partner apps which are not as well engineered as Google Apps.
Google docs has concurrent editing capability that Office 365 cannot match - but to educate users to use this degree of collaboration is a journey. In our own case, while all employees have been issued laptops, ensuring they bring it to a meeting and make notes straight onto laptop or send emails wrt points discussed in meeting is a challenge - people write on paper, go back to their office, type it out on laptops and then communicate. So real-time collab is something we have to work towards. Gmail and voice and talk and youtube are features that office 365 will take some time to match. I would suggest you do a comparison of what you need against each of the broad capabilities in Office 365 and Google Apps.
Regarding the User Interface - if you have people who use laptop more an handheld then there is no good replacement for Outlook. So you will have to couple Outlook with gmail. This works but I have read that there are limitations but Google Sync seems to have solved most of it. Of course you have to continue to use MS Office since Google Apps offers no offline capability. So with current capabilities of both products you can have a Google Apps server + MS Office + Outlook as clients with Google sync and Google cloud connect.
Regarding security - Google has a US govt accepted security certification that certifies that Google Apps is secure, details available on google site. I would argue that most enterprise IT infra will not qualify for that security certification. Google Apps is probably more secure than most enterprise IT infra.
Most importantly- why do you want to do it? For what business benefit? If you want to save cost by moving to cloud infra - then google apps and o365 are each appropriate depending on what your business needs. I doubt cloud hosting will save cost. I think it will improve availability and will reduce the overhead of managing your own datacenter. And change management can be best handled by retaining user facing applications like Outlook and MS Office so users are unlikely to experience a change except when they access email through a browser. This would be path of least resistance
Google sites does not have the depth of features that Sharepoint online (part of Office 365) has. For instance - Sharepoint has native workflow, google apps offers workflow through partner apps which are not as well engineered as Google Apps.
Google docs has concurrent editing capability that Office 365 cannot match - but to educate users to use this degree of collaboration is a journey. In our own case, while all employees have been issued laptops, ensuring they bring it to a meeting and make notes straight onto laptop or send emails wrt points discussed in meeting is a challenge - people write on paper, go back to their office, type it out on laptops and then communicate. So real-time collab is something we have to work towards. Gmail and voice and talk and youtube are features that office 365 will take some time to match. I would suggest you do a comparison of what you need against each of the broad capabilities in Office 365 and Google Apps.
Regarding the User Interface - if you have people who use laptop more an handheld then there is no good replacement for Outlook. So you will have to couple Outlook with gmail. This works but I have read that there are limitations but Google Sync seems to have solved most of it. Of course you have to continue to use MS Office since Google Apps offers no offline capability. So with current capabilities of both products you can have a Google Apps server + MS Office + Outlook as clients with Google sync and Google cloud connect.
Regarding security - Google has a US govt accepted security certification that certifies that Google Apps is secure, details available on google site. I would argue that most enterprise IT infra will not qualify for that security certification. Google Apps is probably more secure than most enterprise IT infra.
Most importantly- why do you want to do it? For what business benefit? If you want to save cost by moving to cloud infra - then google apps and o365 are each appropriate depending on what your business needs. I doubt cloud hosting will save cost. I think it will improve availability and will reduce the overhead of managing your own datacenter. And change management can be best handled by retaining user facing applications like Outlook and MS Office so users are unlikely to experience a change except when they access email through a browser. This would be path of least resistance
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