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Old 24 Feb 2017, 07:41 AM   #1
GERGE
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O365 Business Essentials or G Suite?

Hi,

After getting tired of different services for different aspects of online communication, I started to look for a complete solution. What I want is a service that offers contacts, calendars, tasks and emails together with good integration. I need to use my own domain and want OS X, iOS and Android apps.

I think the best for me would either be O365 Business Essentials or G Suite. But I never really used any of them, I was using Runbox and Apple services. I do have a Google account but no Gmail. Same for the Microsoft, I only have an account with them for desktop-based Office.

I am sure there are many people here with some experience with both of them. Any recommendations? Right now I am leaning towards O365 since they also give 1TB OneDrive space and 50GB mail space seperate from that. G Suite only gives 30GB for everything (I am talking abour $5 plans here). I am using 200GB iCloud right now but it is almost full. Outlook is also a great app available everywhere.

Thanks.
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Old 24 Feb 2017, 10:49 AM   #2
David
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While Microsoft are currently dwindling, Google have (and always have been) gaining strength.
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Old 24 Feb 2017, 11:03 AM   #3
jhollington
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If you're looking to use Outlook, then O365 is pretty much the winner hands-down. O365 is basically like hosting your own Microsoft Exchange server, so it provides almost all of the flexibility that would offer and completely tight integration with Outlook on Windows, Mac, and iOS for not only e-mail, but calendars and contacts.

On the iOS side, you also get the advantage of absolutely native Exchange ActiveSync support if you're using the built-in Mail, Calendar, and Contacts apps (rather than Outlook). This is not something that G Suite really provides to the same degree.... I think they still have "Google Sync" but it's a bit odder by comparison because you're basically trying to map Gmail's way of doing things (archive vs delete, labels vs folders) into a system that wasn't fully designed for it.

It's also worth keeping in mind that G Suite doesn't really do "tasks" that well compared to O365.

Ultimately, I think from a UI point of view, G Suite wins out if you want to work entirely within web interfaces, while O365 is a better choice if you prefer to use native clients.

G Suite of course gives you a few other things that go a bit beyond what O365 offers — your "Google Account" with G Suite will be used for all other things Google from Photos to Search to YouTube.... Google does a better job of trying to be "everything" that you'd ever need online, while O365 focuses on the core communications aspects.

I'm primarily a Mac/iOS users, and Apple Mail is my client of choice on both platforms. I've been a G Suite user for years, but no longer use it for email — basically, I'm paying to keep my Google Account alive, and I do use Google Drive as a secondary backup storage service, having moved primarily over to iCloud as of macOS Sierra. My e-mail is hosted on FastMail (using my own domain name), while I use iCloud for calendars, contacts, and tasks (reminders). I've been back and forth with Gmail over the years, but I only ever used it in the web interface — it was my desire to use Apple Mail that drew me away from Gmail to other services, ranging from running my own server to finally settling back down on FastMail (once they added native iOS push support).

In the midst of all of that, I also considered O365 — I've done a lot of work with Exchange servers over the last decade or so, and have been an Exchange/Outlook/Entourage (the old Mac client) user at various points in my life, but while I do subscribe to O365 for the Office suite of apps, I just didn't see the need for a full Exchange experience as an individual Mac/iOS user.
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Old 24 Feb 2017, 11:06 AM   #4
jhollington
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David View Post
While Microsoft are currently dwindling, Google have (and always have been) gaining strength.
To be fair, I'm not sure that's entirely true in the core e-mail and collaboration space.... Microsoft doesn't attract a lot of interest or press buzz, but it's still a really solid solution that a huge number of business customers still swear by.

While Google has wooed some really big-name clients into G Suite, most of these came from legacy in-house environments, including not only Microsoft Exchange, but also other systems like Novell's GroupWise, and Google's actually lost some traction in that area since Microsoft got with the program and realized that they had to offer a competing SaaS solution rather than simply trying to convince every business to build their own Exchange server farm.
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Old 24 Feb 2017, 12:12 PM   #5
David
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jhollington View Post
To be fair, I'm not sure that's entirely true in the core e-mail and collaboration space.... Microsoft doesn't attract a lot of interest or press buzz, but it's still a really solid solution that a huge number of business customers still swear by.

While Google has wooed some really big-name clients into G Suite, most of these came from legacy in-house environments, including not only Microsoft Exchange, but also other systems like Novell's GroupWise, and Google's actually lost some traction in that area since Microsoft got with the program and realized that they had to offer a competing SaaS solution rather than simply trying to convince every business to build their own Exchange server farm.
Moving forward: I realize that Google may not be a perfect alternative for everyone.

They used to say, that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. These days, the trade off is sometimes difficult to decide (the baskets are moving around) My own choice is to stay as as close to 'open source' as possible.....
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Old 24 Feb 2017, 11:38 PM   #6
jhollington
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Quote:
Originally Posted by David View Post
They used to say, that you should never put all your eggs in one basket. These days, the trade off is sometimes difficult to decide (the baskets are moving around) My own choice is to stay as as close to 'open source' as possible.....
Yup, I agree completely on that in principle, and I think that having one's own domain name and keeping data on your own computers is a big step in not really caring which cloud basket your eggs are in ... plus staying with 'open standards' even more than open source.

I've switched my mail/calendars/contacts between self-hosted servers (both Dovecot/Postfix and Exchange at various points), FastMail, Gmail, iCloud, and probably a couple of others many times over, but at the end of the day, if I'm using established protocols and standards for my stuff (IMAP, CardDAV, CalDAV, etc), it's more about choosing which cloud server to syncing my local data with than which one is going to be at the center of my digital life. If anything, Gmail was probably the farthest from that principle for me, although the was largely because I chose to primarily use the web UI rather than IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV or Google Sync clients for my data.
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Old 25 Feb 2017, 12:28 AM   #7
GERGE
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Thanks for all your help.

I decided to go with O365 Business Essentials. Price is good, I already use Office so I have the desktop apps. Exchange is powerful and, as you said, it works very well with mobile.

I don't like to use webapps if I can, so Outlook is a very good plus for me. With all the extensions it is very powerful. I really liked Android and iOS app too (I use an iPad and an Android phone) But what really made the choice for me was 50GB mail storage and 1TB cloud storage. All other features seemed similar.

I always though that a business solution like O365 would be unnecessary for personal use, but it seems I was mistaken. I have already notices business oriented features in Outlook I believe I will make use of.
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Old 25 Feb 2017, 12:38 AM   #8
jhollington
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Quote:
Originally Posted by GERGE View Post
I always though that a business solution like O365 would be unnecessary for personal use, but it seems I was mistaken. I have already notices business oriented features in Outlook I believe I will make use of.
Yup, it's quite powerful. If I were still primarily a Windows user, I'm pretty sure I'd have never even considered anything other than Microsoft Exchange/O365 platform, but as somebody who is entirely a Mac/IOS user it doesn't have quite the same "fit" as using iCloud and a standard IMAP solution.
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Old 25 Feb 2017, 10:16 PM   #9
TenFour
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I see you have answered your own question, but I think it comes down to whether or not you need the functionality offered by the desktop versions of Office. Many businesses do, but others do not. I suspect that 90+% of individuals would be better served by G Suite or even the free Google offerings you get with an email account. In my experience having used both in a professional capacity I believe G Suite/Gmail are more than enough for many small businesses too, especially if what you do involves travel of any sort where having everything web-centric is important. Things like online document collaboration just work much more smoothly using Google products. My daughter, who is away at college, and I frequently share things via Google and she uses a Macbook while I am typically on an old PC running Ubuntu or on my phone. In my professional life we often resorted to simply emailing attachments around because the various Office solutions are so clunky, unreliable, and slow. But, it really depends on what you need out of your software. Some people are lost without the full power of Excel and Powerpoint, while others are very happy with the simplicity of Google stuff. Zoho is another free option and you can even have domain email through them.
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