Welcome to TheOhioOutdoors
Wanting to join the rest of our members? Login or sign up today!
Sign up

Office 365 vs. G-Suite

bowhunter1023

Owner/Operator
Staff member
49,614
288
Appalachia
All sorts of varied knowledge around this place and I know there are some well-educated opinions on this topic, so I'm throwing it out there for input.

Professionally, I've spent most of my career working within Microsoft apps, but have been in a G-Suite setting for the last 4 years. I consider Outlook to be the superior email and calendar tool, both of which are very important when it comes to what I do day in and day out. I was an early adopter of Google Suite for TOO and other personal interests, and consider Drive and Sheets to be among the most important tools in my toolbox. Gmail is alright and so is Google Calendar, but they're no Outlook.

Our organization is growing and we're teaming with projects, so I desperately need to adopt a project management tracking tool. I've tried a handful of things, but was recently shown Planner and first impressions have me considering it for this for our PM tracking. To do this, we'll need to buy a 365 subscription for a nominal fee and I'd want to migrate us away from Gmail and Google Calendar, to Outlook. We'd maintain our G-Suite for the historical data, but would slowly migrate us over to a Microsoft support business enterprise system.

Thoughts for those of you who grasp that bit of jargon soup 😂
 
Microsoft products is what I use, always recommend and have implemented for nearly every client over the decades, going all the wat back to the day when Microsoft first hit the market. I've used and implemented many other well-known business class management suites/applications/tools as well, but Microsoft is the one I know thoroughly from experience, trained on extensively and actually prefer over anything else. Microsoft 365 is what I currently use for both businesses, the wife's and mine.


Good luck to ya!
 
Last edited:
I guess the first question is what kinds of projects are you tracking? The software you would need for a code based project would be different than what you would need for building construction or landscaping or business engagements.
 
I would agree with you that Outlook is the superior email and calendar solution. Teams is good for collaboration and video conferencing and it interfaces seamlessly with Outlook. The IT shops Ive worked at all use Office for a variety of reasons. But they never used Planner. For software projects they prefer Jira.
 
I'm a big fan of 365. But Gmails predictive text is a nice feature. They both have their pros and cons but to me 365 wins the race.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Tipmoose
tmp_4.gif
 
Without a broken back and healthy lungs and enjoy retirement as well....sorry to cut in...proceed with smart talk ill go sit in the corner.
Naw dude...Im just joking around. Hence the :D at the bottom of my pic. The fact I get paid to do what I do amazes me every day.
 
I guess the first question is what kinds of projects are you tracking? The software you would need for a code based project would be different than what you would need for building construction or landscaping or business engagements.
I'm not an IT nerd 😉

My projects are programmatically based and resemble (and will include) construction projects. Most of my projects have multiple parts, with multiple timelines, but a generally linear start-to-finish process. I'm very reliant on third parties to execute anything I do, which ofte. makes it hard for me to control timelines. An example would be a 60,000SF downtown building we are looking to renovate. If that happens, I absolutely need to track everything that will be taking place, especially managing a multitude of vendors.

Another aspect of this is that I tend to manage everything in the grey space between my ears, which isn't great for succession planning. Getting all our work into a PM platform would help that tremendously.
 
I'm not an IT nerd 😉

My projects are programmatically based and resemble (and will include) construction projects. Most of my projects have multiple parts, with multiple timelines, but a generally linear start-to-finish process. I'm very reliant on third parties to execute anything I do, which ofte. makes it hard for me to control timelines. An example would be a 60,000SF downtown building we are looking to renovate. If that happens, I absolutely need to track everything that will be taking place, especially managing a multitude of vendors.

Another aspect of this is that I tend to manage everything in the grey space between my ears, which isn't great for succession planning. Getting all our work into a PM platform would help that tremendously.
This makes sense. Back in the day the go to project management system was Microsoft Project. It offers timelines, Gantt charts, budget etc. I'm not aware of how this differs from Microsoft Planner. I'll check it out and see if I can figure it out. Found it!

 
  • Like
Reactions: bowhunter1023