Many schools are considering productivity in the cloud as a migration from existing on-premises legacy IT stack. This starts with Active Directory and directory services for identity and permission management at a very granular policy level. Microsoft clearly has an edge with its lengthy tenure as an enterprise environment.
Office mix for teachers Offline#
Google simply does not provide offline application support, as everything runs in the browser. With locally installed versions of the productivity software, a user is able to work with local Microsoft tools – even without having internet access.
Office mix for teachers mac#
Now the discrepancy between versions of Office applications has been resolved between Mac and Windows, which opens up the real competitive discussion: offline use of productivity apps.
Up until now, Mac users were relegated to Office 2011 versions. Only recently has Microsoft launched Office 2016 with native versions for local Mac installation.
Office mix for teachers software#
But the downloadable local installable versions of the software weren’t current between Mac and Windows. When Microsoft launched Office 365, they added seamless, browser-based application compatibility that worked well on Mac. Google was able to offer very consistent features as a browser-based platform. This was an important distinction with so many Macs being used inside of school environments. I am going to focus on some of these key differences:Īt one point, Google could claim it was better in this category because it could offer the applications across both operating systems as a browser-based solution. Getting past the end-user productivity level, a lot of the key differences have more impact on the organization and your school’s IT team itself. FeatureĨ key differences between Google Apps for Education and Office 365 In fact, when looking at the following chart, you can see many similarities down the line with each of the primary features. When evaluating Google Apps For Education (also referred to as GAE) vs Microsoft Office 365 for education, I find a very similar feature set at the end-user level for productivity, communication, and collaboration. You, in fact, may notice an editorial bias on the part of this reporter toward the MS side of the ledger, but I promise to do my best in presenting a fair and balanced report on the comparison.įeatures for productivity, communication, and collaboration That’s an incredibly complex question with potentially hundreds of comparison points, and a lot of subjective biases depending upon who you ask. Invariably the question that surfaces is, “Which platform is better?” The Google Apps for Education vs Microsoft Office 365 debate rages on. Microsoft offers its MicroSoft Office 365 for education. Specifically, Google offers its platform to education providers as Google Apps for Education. The top two providers for cloud-based productivity tools are Google and Microsoft. Many schools have started considering adding a cloud productivity application suite for staff and students to use.