Switching from Microsoft to Google

[APMerry]

Has anyone made the switch from O365 to google workspace?

 

I've been asked to look into it, with the goal of saving money. Personally I think it's a lot of upheaval when we already have all our users in 365 and are heavily using OneDrive and Sharepoint.

 

I'm trying to go serverless and have recommended we manage devices in intune. The question came back "why haven't you looked at google?"

[mavhc]

Because you'd all complain that your worksheets you downloaded from the internet show up with slightly different formatting.

 

Do they think managing computers on GSuite is free?

[PotNoodleTech]

Office35 is free to schools? What money are you expecting to save?

 

Or do you mean actually getting rid of all your Windows devices too?

 

We have 1000 chromebooks and could actually dump microsoft if needed. Are you in that position? If not it's gonna be a lot of work and training for teachers etc.

Edited March 10, 2025 by PotNoodleTech

[APMerry]

Office35 is free to schools? What money are you expecting to save?

 

Or do you mean actually getting rid of all your Windows devices too?

 

We have 1000 chromebooks and could actually dump microsoft if needed. Are you in that position? If not it's gonna be a lot of work and training for teachers etc.

 

Office Apps, Windows and extras like conditional access are not free. I've looked into both scenario's, going completely google or having windows devices with google workspace, it is a bit cheaper but not enough to justify actually doing it. I think I'm just looking for clarification from other that this is in fact a stupid question.

[PotNoodleTech]

It's not stupid, it's a valid question - it depends where you are in your google journey. For me it would be a net saving as we already have all of our google chromebooks licences and already pay upgraded licence for teachers so actually dumping windows and windows devices would actually save us money.

 

If you've got no chromebooks, no chrome licences, no teacher education licences etc then dumping windows is going to cost you because your gonna have to buy all of the google licences etc.

 

Should be faily easy for you to come up with two cost figures which you can present to the SLT member that asked?

[APMerry]

I'm in a situation where we're just finally getting rid of RM CC4 and going serverless. We need to replace most of our computers due to their age and our OVS agreement is ending. So this means new MS agreement and moving to CSP M365 A3 licenses and the cost of those vs workspace for education licenses. The cost of replacing Windows devices vs chrome devices.

 

The cost of actually setting up intune or google is fairly similar as it's basically my time or we pay someone to do it for us, same with moving data.

 

I agree it's a valid question with regards to costs. It's the work involved and the lack of experience in any of our staff that makes me think it's a bad idea.

[Ditto]

Yes, a fair question. However, I think an educational basis needs to drive the decision, not just license and hardware costs. It's worth being aware of the costs of a migration and then ongoing from a purely IT point of view, but you might want to flip the question back and ask is there a basis other than financial cost. e.g. is there an educational basis to do so. Interestingly, your time researching this will have a cost - but of course many in schools think that's for free!!!

[PotNoodleTech]

Well - I would say running 1000 chrome devices is about the same as running a maximum of 100 windows devices.

 

Chromebook device management is a lot easier and the actual chrome O/S itself is ultra reliable. We only have to "wipe" one out of 1000 devices month roughly the rest just work day in day out. Same goes for user management. Same goes for app management frankly, if it's on the play store then it's probably gonna work fine.

 

Windows is getting worse, all I hear about intune are complaints and horror stories.

 

Would be worth considering both options carefully. We have some massive 1:1 chromebook academy trusts etc on here with tens of thousands of devices, hopefully they will chime in soon.

[mavhc]

Is it ever worth switching though? Not as if one solution is 10x better, not even 2x. The years of helping people move to a new system are not going to be outweighed by any advantages

[gszech]

Is it ever worth switching though? Not as if one solution is 10x better, not even 2x. The years of helping people move to a new system are not going to be outweighed by any advantages

Is it ever worth switching though?

Yes.

 

Not as if one solution is 10x better, not even 2x.

It's cheaper, faster, easy to manage and secure.

 

The years of helping people move to a new system are not going to be outweighed by any advantages

Staff will adjust in less than a month.

[APMerry]

Is it ever worth switching though?

Yes.

 

Not as if one solution is 10x better, not even 2x.

It's cheaper, faster, easy to manage and secure.

 

The years of helping people move to a new system are not going to be outweighed by any advantages

Staff will adjust in less than a month.

 

Are you full google or mixture of both?

[DrCheese]

Windows is getting worse, all I hear about intune are complaints and horror stories.

 

Yes, Intune is a pile of hot garbage compared to how easy the Chrome admin setup is. I want to lock a device or change a policy? Applied in less than ten seconds.

 

Intune?.. Eh.. whenever the hell it feels like. Instant? A few hours? 24 hours? Who knows!

 

I say this as a Windows fanboy... I still think Windows/M365 is a better ecosystem as a whole but I'll be damned if I don't get wound up by it at times!

 

Microsoft - CLONE CHROMEOS!

[gszech]

Are you full google or mixture of both?

 

Depends on the school. We just migrated two primary schools fully to Chromebooks only. They adjusted fine, we had staff onsite for two weeks to iron out all the small problems.

Our secondary school is using Google and a mixture of Windows / Chromebook devices.

[paulkerton]

I'm not getting into which is better for one school or another. That should be done with honest and clear assessments of all of your solutions and needs - not just the whims of the budget or the "taste leaders" in your school. I know which I prefer personally (I'm a Google man) but you will get push back for a multitude of reasons if you take everything they're used to away without fully supporting your various departments in the migration. Teachers are particularly tough customers when it comes to resisting change. (This applies whatever platform you're shifting from and to, btw not just Windows to ChromeOS, any combination!)

 

Particularly those who stand on the idea of "industry standards". Transitioning away from things like 2D Design, Flowol, Photoshop, Smart Notebook, SolidWorks, Crocodile Clips without supporting them and helping them find alternative solutions, or routes to virtualise them will be very difficult. You almost need to try and frame it so they believe it is their idea. You will get people who are wed to what they know and will be VERY hesistant to consider alternative. They'll tell you, despite all evidence to the contrary, that an alternative isn't good enough, or doesn't meet certain curricular requirements, so you'll need to counternance that. You'll also get those who don't want children to have open access to specialist tools, because they're scared the kids will get ahead of them.

 

This is particularly telling in the specialist subjects that aren't necessarily widely taken at GCSE and A-Level. Photography, Design Technology, Music etc.

 

Assess what they have, what is out there as an alternative, and what they're already doing that can already be done multi-platform without too much upheaval.

Well - I would say running 1000 chrome devices is about the same as running a maximum of 100 windows devices.

I would say you're being super generous with the split there. 43K devices (roughly). We have around 82% Chrome, 11.6% Windows and 7% Apple equipment. I haven't got exact figures, but I would say that it's not an unreasonable stance that ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex takes up at most 18.6% of our support time, and Windows and Apple at least 82%

 

The savings you'd make with Google would not only be made up from the support needed to keep them running being massively reduced, but a need for fewer staff to support it in general.... From a technical side at least, you may need staff to support the migration, training on new tools with staffing, particularly in the first instances.

Edited March 10, 2025 by paulkerton

[gszech]

Particularly those who stand on the idea of "industry standards". Transitioning away from things like 2D Design, Flowol, Photoshop, Smart Notebook, SolidWorks, Crocodile Clips without supporting them and helping them find alternative solutions, or routes to virtualise them will be very difficult.

I completely agree. First update your resources so they are cloud based if this is the way the school is going, this might take a couple of years and then migrate.

 

Here are some suggestions:

• 2D Design - https://www.onshape.com/en/why-onshape
  
• Photoshop - https://www.adobe.com/apps/all/web (subscription required)
  
• Smart Notebook - Google Slides or Prowise (but this is another topic)
  
• SolidWorks, Crocodile Clips, Flowol - we don't use this so I guess it's not mandatory?
  

[APMerry]

I appreciate the responses. It's thrown a bit of a spanner in the works for me. I had suggested intune as we are already in the 365 ecosystem and frankly my suggestion was not based on trying to save money. Just moving to the cloud itself is saving us some money.

 

Anyone had experience of migrating users and data between the 2?

[TechMonkey]

Dig a bit deeper and see if you can find reasoning why the suggestion was made. Is it in the spirit of 3 quotes, wanting to ensure the school is getting best value? Or is it a lack of understanding of what is covered by M365 or Google. Do they realise that it would effectively be a change of philosophy? Do they understand the level of change that would be needed?

I'd say as long as the school is happy to make a wholesale change then you could save money. BUT the issue will be when certain departments or staff want something that doesn't fit.

 

I could go on and on about the comparisons to make, the caveats and the additional costs that may be overlooked. I wouldn't say that a comparison would be a bad idea but find out what they are actually after before putting a lot of work into it, only to find out they thought it was as simple as opening Google instead of Word.

[rogerdnixon]

We onboard schools into our Trust that are O365 and we are one of the biggest Google Workspace orgs in England. Happy to discuss what some of the actual benefits are and how to practically do it. Just PM me and we can fire up a Meet at some point. I would echo what others have said - this is less about cost and more about the tools and their impact on learning.

[TwistedHelixis]

I have just purchased some Windows endpoint licences from Google for £4 per Windows device per year. This gives us user login to Windows devices using Google accounts, I can also push policies out to Windows devices from Google Workspace, similar to InTune.

 

In my testing this has been working very well. We are currently using Google Fundamentals which is free.

 

Not sure how much (if anything) this would cost in the MS ecosystem, but I can fully manage all our Windows devices from the cloud for £4 per device using Google Workspace.

 

EDIT, should point out that all our data is already in Google ecosystem and all pupils and some staff are using Chromebooks.

 

EDIT2, we now only have 12 Windows devices in this school, so that's £48 per year to manage them, which is a massive saving over having to buy a Windows server + licensing etc.

Edited March 10, 2025 by TwistedHelixis

[mavhc]

Where do you buy resources in Google format?

 

Surely retraining everyone and moving your whole lesson setup for the 1000s of already prepared lessons your teachers have setup vastly outweigh any licencing costs, teachers cost loads per hour

[TwistedHelixis]

Where do you buy resources in Google format?

 

Google Drive does support MS Office file formats, along with Google file formats and other formats like PDF.

 

At this school we started off using Google Drive for desktop on all our Windows devices, along with the installed version of MS Office. Everyone used all the normal Windows office software, but saved into Google drive for desktop. Then over time some realized they could access everything from the browser and stopped using the desktop version of MS office. It has been a very fluid approach and we still have a few that want to keep using MS Office.

Edited March 10, 2025 by TwistedHelixis

[mavhc]

Does it support them better than MS Office Web does, because that's pretty bad at formatting word docs, and excel files often break.

 

If you save to GDrive do you get collaboration features? Seems like MSOffice is really tightly knit with M365, Onedrive, Sharepoint.

 

I'm fine with using GSuite natively, but having to integrate with MS file formats just seems like too much pain. I'm surprised companies aren't selling content that can be easily imported into GDrive and GClassroom

[PotNoodleTech]

Where do you buy resources in Google format?

 

Surely retraining everyone and moving your whole lesson setup for the 1000s of already prepared lessons your teachers have setup vastly outweigh any licencing costs, teachers cost loads per hour

 

You just upload them to google drive and then they just work pretty much exactly as they did before. The days of all the text appearing backwards once you upload it are thankfully long gone. It's a non issue IMHO.

[Primus]

You just upload them to google drive and then they just work pretty much exactly as they did before. The days of all the text appearing backwards once you upload it are thankfully long gone. It's a non issue IMHO.

 

We've moved schools over to our Trust Google Workspace tenant and got rid of their 365 implementation, we've had very very few issues with documents converting - in fact I couldn't tell you the last time Docs mangled a Word Document.

 

Our use of Chrome OS is increasing massively over this academic year, we will still have Windows devices but only really in specialised areas where they're needed still for things such as Photoshop since the online version of Photoshop isn't good enough yet (there are other areas too but it's decreasing year on year).

[Ditto]

We've moved schools over to our Trust Google Workspace tenant and got rid of their 365 implementation, we've had very very few issues with documents converting - in fact I couldn't tell you the last time Docs mangled a Word Document.

 

Our use of Chrome OS is increasing massively over this academic year, we will still have Windows devices but only really in specialised areas where they're needed still for things such as Photoshop since the online version of Photoshop isn't good enough yet (there are other areas too but it's decreasing year on year).

As someone who has been through the journey that is at the centre of what the OP asked about and has come out of the other side, could you summarise the good and the bad. From the thread so far, it appears to me to be

 

i) Licensing costs - much the same

ii) Administration in Google far easier