From on premise Office to G Suite

[kennysarmy]

After reading about Airbus:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/14/airbus_ditches_microsoft_for_google/

 

I wondered for those that made the move to G Suite what was the compelling reasons for you to do so?

[fiza]

Collaboration. When we did a comparison back in 2014 Google Apps, as it was then, was way ahead on live collaboration on documents. MS have now caught up but we haven't looked back.

Some Staff still use Office but most students now put everything in G Suite.

[FN-GM]

What he said ^^

 

Also the ability to access it anywhere on a whole range of devices bust still have a consistent user experience. Office is on various platforms but they act differently on different systems.

[TwistedHelixis]

Well we did something that I have since realized is not the norm, we gave each of our schools a choice. We setup a few dummy accounts in both G Suite and Office 365 and then got each school to try them for a few weeks. This was a few years ago now but they all wanted Google.

[mavhc]

Do they use Classroom a lot? I found it quite good.

 

What do they do for record keeping, copies of work etc? My school is so old fashioned, always printing stuff out.

[mjk]

we moved due to the collaboration aspect - Google was just a better product.

Not seen Office 365 for a while now but I think it's much more focused on business systems whereas Google is more about working together which is what schools need.

Now we moved we find we're saving lots of money compared to other schools so it's been win-win.

[mavhc]

Google works with way more 3rd parties, is simpler, has been around longer. However GSuite for Education doesn't have all the things that their Enterprise version does

 

Office365 is stupidly complex, 700 different plans, subscriptions for things that are free, weird interactions with Azure, can't tell what you have to pay for. But the education version is the enterprise version.

 

We use both.

[fiza]

Google works with way more 3rd parties, is simpler, has been around longer. However GSuite for Education doesn't have all the things that their Enterprise version does

 

Office365 is stupidly complex, 700 different plans, subscriptions for things that are free, weird interactions with Azure, can't tell what you have to pay for. But the education version is the enterprise version.

 

We use both.

Do your users have 2 usernames/email addresses each then?

[mavhc]

Same usernames, we don't use Gmail, except as a demo for the students. Annoyingly our council won't give me control of DNS unless we leave them as an ISP, they did before but don't want to now for some reason, and they're too useless to set up anything fancy.

[fiza]

Is it possible to do it the other way around and use Gmail but sign up for office 365 with the same username?

[mavhc]

Yeah, email goes to wherever you set the MX record to. If you have 2 subdomains you could split it too, staff.school.la.sch.uk, students.school.la.sch.uk, but then your email address is super long

 

Sadly there's no option in OneDrive to make a new Google Doc, or in GDrive to make a new O365 Word doc, would be so easy to add, but they don't want to.

[dapaulio]

We stuck with o365 and in my opinion not looking to move away. There were some half hearted requested from staff recently but not enough to trial g suite. G suite had a year or so that they were the better product over ms but ms have since matched their rivals.

[mjk]

G suite had a year or so that they were the better product over ms but ms have since matched their rivals.

 

I'm pretty sure that Google has had a better product for over ten years. I was looking at O365 with a colleague the other day and it's still missing some critical functionality for schools like parental access for the classroom product a simple way of using e-portfolios and file stream. Some of the software integrations are rather poor as well (look at how things like geogebra integrate into Classroom). I think Microsoft have done enough to still be relevant to business but it's not nearly as good for education as Google suite.

[fiza]

parental access for the classroom

I thought parents could only get email digests of what work was set in Classroom not actual access to classroom?

[DGardiner]

GSuite all the way here, microsoft has chopped and changed the licencing for o365 so much i dont trust them not to decide its not included with ovs at some point.

 

pickup of drive has been slow and organic and hasnt been pushed but the higher ups are starting to see the advantages and putting them to use, filestream whilst early on has been a key part of that IMO

[mavhc]

I'm pretty sure that Google has had a better product for over ten years. I was looking at O365 with a colleague the other day and it's still missing some critical functionality for schools like parental access for the classroom product a simple way of using e-portfolios and file stream. Some of the software integrations are rather poor as well (look at how things like geogebra integrate into Classroom). I think Microsoft have done enough to still be relevant to business but it's not nearly as good for education as Google suite.

 

What are you using for e-portfolios?

[mjk]

What are you using for e-portfolios?

 

sites, but only for sixth form because they create their own. We'll wait for the new sites api before provisioning the rest of the school