Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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'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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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