Google Documents and Microsoft Live Office Online

By Nicole Williams
Published on Tuesday, April 01, 2008
ARTICLES

One challenge in a mobile office, or when working with contractors, is communicating well on project status, document versions, task lists and schedules. Especially difficult is getting online tools to work well with internal organizational processes and staff habits. Both Google and Microsoft have free online products that attempt to bridge this gap:

Microsoft Live Office Online: workspace.office.com (new beta)
GoogleDocs (combined with Google everything): docs.google.com

I love it when competition springs up like this because the consumer ultimately gets the best of both worlds; each provider adds the popular features of its competitor and axes the annoying things. For now, however, each service still has some pointed differences, which are highlighted below.

Both services would do well to offer a document-caching option. Thus, if you made shared document changes while offline, the caching feature would automatically update the local and web-based versions when you again connect to the Internet.

Depending on your organization's internal habits and external collaboration needs, one or the other service may be more suitable. With the competition started, however, it will be interesting to see how quickly Google and Microsoft copy the other's features and become more interoperable.

Nicole Williams is the management and technology advisor at SPN. Email her at williams@spn.org.

Feature	GoogleDocs	MS Live Office Online
Create folders and sub folders.	Create as many as you like.	Create a workspace per single topic. All documents are loose in that workspace.
Easy communication with MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel.	No workable synchronization tool at this time. System works better with open source Google formats.	Plug in available. If you edit an online document in Word or Excel, then choose "save," the online version is automatically updated.
Easy Communication with MS Outlook.	No workable synchronization. Google calendar has a beta tool for Outlook Synching.	Task lists and calendar items synchronize easily, but with quirks.
Mac-PC interoperability	Works well on both platforms.	Mac features are not as robust as PC features.
Access to documents with no internet connection.	Not possible.	Not possible.
Security	Google scans content for the purposes of advertising. Always exercise caution when placing materials online. Hackers will try to access it.	Microsoft has a policy of not scanning content for advertising. Always exercise caution when placing materials online. Hackers will try to access it.
Ease of training.	Medium difficulty	Medium difficulty
Version and edit tracking	Tracks edits on a tracking tab.	Capability programmed in, but it does not work well.
Online collaboration	Collaboration real time online with up to 50 users.	Collaboration is "offline" only between users, using a check-in check-out model.
Installation	Requires no client installation.	Requires Office client installation, management, patching, etc. on client.

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