After toiling in the Google Workspace (nee G Suite) desert for three-plus years, our new CFO has announced we are going back to Office 365. I could not be more excited.
It has been painful watching the constant stream of O365 updates while Google has done next to nothing to meaningfully improve their suite. The explosion of Teams in particular stands in sharp contrast to what has happened (or rather hasnāt happened) to Hangouts>Meet. The one thing Iām anxious about is transitioning from Drive to OneDrive; not so much files and folders, but permissions and ways of working (two small examples being my habit of just searching for files in the Chrome address bar, and saving frequently used files as Chrome shortcuts). But I will not miss Meet/Rooms, or Gmail, or Currents (nee Plus).
Interesting, do your co-workers share your contempt for G-Suite? Iāve only ever been on O365 so Iāve got no basis for comparison.
Teams is nice but their Electron desktop app can be frustratingly slow to respond. They need to get on top of that.
Have you got an IT dept handling the file transition or are you left to your own devices?
Itās a mixed bag as far as everyoneās like/dislike for Google. Most everyone likes using Docs for shared notes and Sheets for simple shared spreadsheets. Marketing, HR and other internal-facing groups were also fine with Slides for the most part. I think many people are fine with Gmail and Google Calendar. The Outlook power users and older crowd who came up through Outlook or Lotus Notes didnāt love it, but younger associates were fine-- and there was a vocal contingent of people who hated Outlook as bloated and complex. Very few people have experience with the modern, web-based Outlook.
The real problem is that weāre an analytics company and all of our analysts and consultants rely on Excel-- and more critically, all of our clients rely on Excel and PowerPoint so we do too. So huge swaths of the company werenāt necessarily disdainful, but they found it kind of annoying and pointless that we were forced to use these two different systems. Iām disdainful because I follow Microsoft and knew years ago where Office was heading, and how much MS was going to invest in it. And just as they started to push O365, our old CTO switched to Google to save money. Google paid out the rest of our Office contract, gave us dedicated Google resources to help with change management, etc., made us a showcase partner, talked up this great game about transforming the nature of work, and then did nothing.
Make no mistake, though- I gave it my level best. I led the transition for our group, I joined our āGoogle Guideā program, I held office hours, I moved templates and workflows to G Suite, I created G Plus groups and Google Sites for our teams, I pushed constantly to move people to Chat/Rooms for project work. I was an advocate, but I also continued to push for improvements and highlight shortcomings. And Google just didnāt do much of anything.
As far as file transitions, yes, we have a global team that will manage all of that. It will probably take a year to unwind all of the Google stuff, but weāll get there-- and I think it will be closer to the vision we had five years ago.