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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

Of course it does. We (@ work) use G Suite and it's good if you use it for simple things, but it's really a toy. People who work a _lot_ with long-ish documents all know that Word is better (because of richer functionality); and people who work with larger spreadsheets know that Excel is better (functionality and performance).

It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality -- but users don't use the same 5%.

Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting small/mid size companies.

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The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent desktop native apps.

Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel and started earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!)

I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.

Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate cost.

Yea, I agree.

I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.

Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another.

Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?

No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern.

That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.

OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.

Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the...

AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.

Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services.

Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)

it says at the bottom if you want to avoid the decision tree to rename your personal account. pick a second username and the problem goes away.

OneDrive for Business = rebrand of Sharepoint storage, hence the complete separation from OneDrive's consumer (fka Windows Live Mesh) stuff

They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook

Do they have IMAP or ActiveSync disabled? You should be able to find compatible replacement clients.

> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

Skype for Business and Skype are two completely different, just barely compatible things. They run completely different networking protocols, and the S4B client is still, barring some cosmetic skinning, the same as the Lync client from nearly four years ago. The About page in the S4B client may still be calling itself the Microsoft Lync Client - it was still doing so in the 2016 version of the client this spring...

What a colossal marketing cockup

Very few people care about networking protocols, and SFB is explicitly a business communication tool, meaning that most of your contact will be with people who also have SFB. As for the About page of SFB, I can't comment on what it was before, but I've just checked, it now says Skype For Business 2016.

I only know the details because I write software on top of some of the Lync/S4B APIs, and have to deal with customers that are completely confused why one Skype client they have for making calls works with our software, and their other Skype client with a nearly identical icon that they also use for making calls doesn't...

Which app do these users have? If they have SFB, does this not work?

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Let-users-add-exter...

Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....

> "Like hell I'm not blaming them."

So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?

>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"

Examples?

Then you haven't upgraded: https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...

Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts with things like cough anti-virus providers of ill repute cough and they cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

We're rather fond of Windows 7, because it pretty much just works. (And nobody wants to deal with upgrading) A few of the handful of Win10 laptops have been headaches.

"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...

Funny you say that. Know what I'm doing right now?

Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable. Win7 is frozen!

You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0 affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!

If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use Chromebooks in the first place.

I agree with you that people should upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as they can. But I'm curious about what you mean by misapplications of the Windows UI.

Well, it's not like you can expect Win7 to just doesn't magically support new file formats? Video is complicated and finicky, you'd be doing bullshit tasks like that for one reason or another

I feel your pain. As a tiny business we are still using old and obsolete WSS 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server. We looked into hosted sharepoint last year but the thing is so slow and cumbersome, it drained all happiness from my life. You can smell all the cludgy enterprise features that have been baked it over the years. Not at all fun for a small business that wants something simple that just works. We are dead set to migrate away to another system, something like GlassCube or Asana. The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting.

>"The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting."

Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?

http://www.tableau.com/

http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlikview

http://community.pentaho.com/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Those looks much more in-depth than we are looking for. Sharepoint datasheets lets you create, manage, and view datasets completely inside sharepoint. An end user, for instance, could create dataset of (for instance) company inventory. They can add custom columns with datatype, like inventory count, cost, status, condition, date purchased, etc. They can then create views to filter/sort/group data and display this in different places in a workspace. Data is entered and manage in sharepoint. Has lots of handy uses and you could train non-technical users with it. Replaced lots of excel spreadsheets.

Does a tool like Power BI Desktop not meet your needs? This video gives a quick overview of putting together a report and publishing it to a PowerBI reporting portal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA

I will check it out. Thanks for the link.

Outlook for Android is better than any of the alternative mail clients I can get on my phone. Although that is not saying much...

OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.

Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.

I just uninstalled Outlook for Android and my phone went from unusably-laggy to performing just like new. I had a full charge this morning and it is early afternoon and my battery was at 30%. Android's battery usage analyzer blamed 60% of that on Outlook. Opening Outlook and trying to use it meant 30+ seconds waits while I do simple things like "view the first page of my inbox" or "enter an email address into the To:" field.

You're saying that all the other options are worse??

(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)

Is it? "OneDrive for Business", as I understand, is (an interface to) SharePoint, and completely, aside from branding, different from consumer OneDrive.

Sharepoint is to Exchange as OneDrive is to Outlook.

Sharepoint is the server, Exchange is the server. The Sharepoint server hosts Web OneDrive like the Exchange server hosts OWA Outlook Web Access. If you want to use the desktop client for either, instead of the browser javascript, you can download and install the binary.

SharePoint has been crap in the past, I'd agree with that, and Outlook is poor when it comes to HTML standards, but the rest of O365 seems solid to me. Other than SharePoint, what in particular do you see as weaknesses in the O365 lineup?

> Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

With SharePoint I can share documents and directories with other people in my company.

As much as I think SharePoint is "mediocre", Google Doc is just shit when it comes to sharing[1].

[1] The only sharing google doc does well is sending a link to ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT to a bunch of people by EMAIL ONLY.

What's wrong with their sharing? I don't understand your comment in [1]

With a sharepoint, there is a single place where everything is stored, the sharepoint.

Everything there is accessible, visible and searchable (modulo access permissions). It's de-facto shared.

---

With a Google Drive, all contents is private, only visible by you, only accessible by yourself.

Other people can't access your stuff, people can't search your stuff, people can't even know what may or may not exist.

If you want to share something, you have to email a link a single specific document of yours to selected people (who will each individually have to accept the invite).

How do you keep track of what is shared? by who? to who? how do you share stuff to groups/teams/businessunit? Basically, google docs intuitively goes against everything you want to do in an entreprisey context.

It's easy to share a folder in Google Drive.

Everything you say also goes for Drive... Not sure what you mean?

You can share folders; also, check out Team Drive. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/google-opens-up-its-new-pr...

It's an early access feature, only available since a few days, if you request it personally to a google sales rep.

Yes. That's one of the thing they miss really bad for sharing. It should have been there for 10 years already.

Totally agree. With GDrive you can share a folder with a group of collaborators and anyone can modify or add to the files therein.

With Google Drive I can ALSO share documents and directories with other people in my company. I don't get your point

Yea, that probably wasn't a great example. I think at a basic file storage and sharing perspective the products offer about the same.

However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.

More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.

the new client syncs sharepoint document libraries fine. the only reoccuring problem i have right now is with excel files locking (for 10m??) after editing.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-p...

I use sharepoint as a windows shared network folder. Don't have to use sync tools.

zeedrive?

the new onedrive client with selective sync is nice if you have something like say a 400mb autocad drawing youd rather not stream everytime you double click it. you can sync just the files in the group/documentlibrary you want.

There's also some new team drive coming to address this https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/11/google-team-dri...

Case in point. Google Drive should have had a workflow for teams and organisations since 10 years.

And here is the dilemma with competing with Microsoft:

Compete with Microsoft and forever spend your time with bug fixes, parity issues, and new features the other guy implements.

... OR create enough of the part that essentially means productivity app, but then branch out into your own space and create a product that differentiates itself and creates lock-in.

Google knows that doing the latter is like a dog forever chasing fox and never winning, so it eventually called timoeut on parity and branched off into doing something new and exciting.

What has google done which O365 isn't doing equally well? Google Docs just isn't very great.

Your may have been downvoted, but it's true. I work for a company that drank the Google coolaid and it was a dreadful decision.

Virtually no one uses Google Docs or Sheets. Instead, they struggle on without it, or have their department purchase an incredibly expensive version of Office.

The Google experiment has failed in our organisation. Google Groups and Gmail is a bit of a disaster. Google can't even do basic things, like relabel all email older than a certain date. And the admin interface is ridiculously slow, and frankly buggy. One time, I logged into this frequently used interface and discovered that I got prompted with a post it note every freaking time. That might not seem like much, but it slowed me down and we are under the pump at the moment.

Overall, Google has such great ideas but is totally let down by an utter lack of polish and a total inability to improve their UX, and ensure that they finish off features and products.

So much potential let down by incredibly simple UX errors. It's unbelievably disappointing :(

The thing about Google Docs is, it looks and has the same functionality now as it did circa ten years ago when I first remember using it. I'm not sure what that department in the Googleplex is occupying their time with.

>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

Did they ever have it? Did they ever care about it? Google Docs languished for such a long time and Google never made a real push into the Enterprise.

I think they did care, but they just assumed that the same model which worked in the consumer space (enthusiasm among tech-literate people which then spreads to other people by word-of-mouth, but no support whatsoever) would work for enterprise sales. In their defense, it sometimes does (like for Slack), but it's a different ballgame when you're competing directly against Microsoft and their well-established sales channels.

Office 365 in term of collaborative text document editing is still behind google docs circa 2008.

But I haven't noticed any improvements to google docs since the early days. You can't create templates, you can't upload fonts, a million other things that make it not really usable in a professional setting for external communication.

>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

No, Google was never going to own the market segment once MS got into it seriously. Google could only mark time until that event.

We started our company on G Suite, and after about year switched to O365. At the end of the day, there were two big factors:

1. We were still paying a subscription for Office while on G Suite, the cost to change to fully O365 was at worst net-neutral, but definitely saved about $5/mo per head on paper.

2. Calendaring for Google sucks. We're a distributed team, we have recurring meetings, and lots of updates across various devices. Meeting updates were frequently not persisting to users, cancelled recurring meetings were not going away, etc. Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues.

Outlook/Exchange may be 'non-standard' as far as not playing by the specs, but it really is the standard for anyone who's spent time in a big company, and it was getting really embarrassing when our Google Calendar invites were not playing well with our potential and current clients' Exchange systems and Outlook clients.

I do miss the Google Apps sign in to all the various services we use. Some have integration w/ O365 or generic identity authentications, but most either don't or charge a lot extra. Other than that, I don't miss a single thing from G suite that O365 doesn't do just the same or a little better.

"Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues."

Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite. We use Google Calendar throughout (I worked at Google) and never had problems.

We weren't. We started on G Suite, we had people (myself included except for personal stuff) who've always been on Exchange- but we as a company didn't start on it.

The final straw really was the problems we were having with everyone else's Exchange systems. If I'm organizing a meeting from Google and you're a client of mine on Exchange, there is a high likelihood that if I have to update the meeting details or change times you will not be seeing the correct information on some or all of your devices.

If we didn't have to interface with other companies, sure- we could live with it. But if I'm paying the exact same money or less to get a service that doesn't have these problems, why shouldn't I switch? It's not like I'm supporting the 'little guy' by choosing GOOG over MSFT.

Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite

That is not his problem. That is google's problem. Ironically, thinking that this is the user's problem may be the root of google lagging in this area.

Microsoft Exchange is deeply entrenched in the corporate world. When you send an invite to a client (or vice versa) and it fails due to integration issues, the typical client will be thinking "oh this is weird; I don't have issues with accepting or sending invites to anyone else!". You don't want to be that guy in your client's head.

Our organisation extensively uses Google calendar and the UI that links itself to rooms is so bad that end users call the Service Desk just to make calendar bookings.

I'd note that both of those arguments boil down to "Microsoft will make your life worse unless you comply". But years in tech support and mail server stuff mean that I loathe Office, and particularly Outlook.

We've switched to G-apps at work (almost 2k people in country, and ~20k+ worldwide using it I think). It's nice for some things, but 100% agree - calendering sucks. A few things off the top of my head:

* You can't export a list of meeting attendees into any other format (like CSV or Excel) with their response status without additional tools or Gscripts

* If there's more than 200 people on an invite, you don't get RSVPs

* There's no reliable way to update all meetings in a recurring series - some things you can change, others you're stuck flicking through your calendar and updating each one individually

* The weird lack of support for any rich-text in the body of a meeting - except if you first write it up in GDocs, then copy and paste it. Then it works fine.

* It allows you to update the time of a meeting but not send updates to the attendees. Why would I ever want to do that?

I gave up on G Suite after the second time somebody blew away all our documents by moving their Google drive folder. You think they could put a safety check in there when G Drive starts up and the folder is empty, "Do you want to delete everything? or do you want to download again?" And there doesn't seem to be a good way to backup Google Documents since they aren't actually documents but just a link to the document.

I'd distinguish between O365 (crap) and native apps like MS Excel, etc.

In my experience G Suite and O365 are equivalent. Useful for a few things, rubbish for anything serious.

Except that an O365 subscription includes the native apps, so the crappy webapp stuff is just a free bonus for enterprises staying on the good native stuff.

Not all subscriptions do. We're on the bottom rung and don't qualify for the native apps (don't ask why, but apparently for ~60k users it's too expensive). We moved from G apps to O365 and I prefer the former. Yes, some people (finance) need excel but most people use it as a glorified list manager.

$8/m vs $20/m

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-offi...

so that would be $3/4 of a million a year to jump to include all desktop apps.

Just curious, do you also consider the web version of O365 to be a "toy" as well?

I think this is gonna change in time. Yes atm Microsoft is the leader of that industry and yes generally most of the larger companies and mid companies use Word/Excel/PP on a day to day basis.

Although I think the newer generations care a bit less about e.g Word etc and they are also more tech savy on doing hard things on google sheets etc, while the older generations might find it extremely hard to convert from Excel to google sheets etc.

Although another factor is laws etc and privacy policies. Google is much less flexible than office365 when it comes to who owns the data, although of course you have to pay for office365 while for google stuff usually you dont have to pay hence your companies docs might be owned by google and I don't see any sane human being wanting that.

GSuite is paid version. AFAIK, they removed the free version. If you have to pay for either of them, and the price difference isn't astronomical, I can see more people choosing office365 over gsuite.

We are talking about S&P 1500 companies. None of them will be using the "free version" of Google docs that come with their free gmail account. The G Apps suite is pretty close in price to the full Office365 package. I simply cant see any major advantage to pay for G Apps over O365.

We are small dev shop - Google suite is cheaper, is good enough and has good integration with paid Gmail.

I pay $15/mo per user for full Office, Exchange, Microsoft Teams/Skype and very decent support.

GSuite is $10/user and offers similar products, but you have to pretty much support yourself.

The $20 extra a month I pay for my small team is negligible.

The company I work for pays even less per person than I do, with the enterprise licensing and the MS cash that gets thrown at us for integrating with them. Our first year of 365 is basically free, same with our switch from our data center to the cloud.

We are looking to save millions a month by making this move.

I pay 3.34 EUR/per user per month. I use Gmail in my company domain - which is IMHO superior to outlook because of tags, which are more expressive than outlook folders. I use apps (some of them not available on Office365 at all - like forms/surveys, websites), calendar synced with mobile, google drive and group conference in hangouts with screen sharing (not working in Office365 in skype on linux - no good app for that)

Since use mostly linux - desktop version of Office365 is useless for me.

To sum it up: one third Office price - no functionality lose for me and some functions not available in Office at all.

This...If I wanted my company to pay move to G Apps from O365, my data scientists and accountants would be in an uproar over why we're paying for a worse data analytics tool (G Sheets vs. Excel).

At this point, it's a marginal cost vs. benefit game: the cost differences between the two services are virtually 0 (and if not, getting closer each month), and the benefits show that we have more to _lose_ than gain from the switch.

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