blog Fascinating news arrives from the Australian today that packaging company Visy has ditched its existing Microsoft email platform and migrated to Google Apps. The newspaper reports:

“Packaging giant Visy will migrate about 5,000 users to Google Apps, the internet giant’s productivity suite, as it replaces Microsoft enterprise-wide.”

There aren’t any direct quotes from Visy in the piece, and it appears to have been sourced on the sidelines of Salesforce.com’s giant Dreamforce conference in the US over the weekend. There is a strong collaboration going on right now in the enterprise between Salesforce.com and Google, as they don’t substantially compete, but do offer complementary software as a service products.

In addition, I haven’t been able to get in contact with anyone from Visy today for further information.

But what really interests me about the fact that Visy has chosen Google for its collaboration suite is the question of why the company didn’t go with Telstra’s version of Microsoft’s Office 365 offering instead.

Seasoned Australian cloud-watchers will remember that Visy was one of the first organisations to sign up to Telstra’s infrastructure as a service cloud offering back in mid-2009. Given Visy doesn’t appear to be worried about hosting its email in an offshore cloud, and taking into account the fact that it was already using Exchange in-house, one wonders why the company didn’t simply bolt on the Telstra Office 365 offering and be done with it.

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1. Thateus
   Posted 06/09/2011 at 4:14 am | Permalink | Reply

   Maybe they want to get out of licensing Microsoft Office products all together? If their needs aren’t advanced, then Google Apps does the job for office productivity.

2. charles sithole
   Posted 06/09/2011 at 4:41 am | Permalink | Reply

   Freedom of choice working at its best

   • devilinthedetail
     Posted 07/09/2011 at 4:04 am | Permalink | Reply

     Freedom of choice?? You mean everything in the cloud with choice of a single browser (Chrome) and no offline client?? Fail….

3. Marcel J Bennett
   Posted 06/09/2011 at 7:39 am | Permalink | Reply

   They chose Google Apps over Office 365 because Microsoft just don’t ‘get’ cloud services. Office 365 is not even close to the service provided by Google, the writer must not have used Google Apps to ask such an obvious question to anyone who has used Google Apps.

   The level of communication between departments and staff massively increases using Google Docs over Microsoft offerings, they just don’t share as well, GDocs allows 50 people to work on a spreadsheet at the same time and does it brilliantly.

   • Renai LeMay
     Posted 06/09/2011 at 11:31 pm | Permalink | Reply

     Um … I don’t think things are quite that simple. Yes, Google Apps can do things which Microsoft’s offering can’t, but there is no doubt that Office 365 is way more feature-rich than Google Apps is. You can’t even compare the featuresets … Microsoft is way out in front in that area. The question of whether you would actually use all those features is a separate one ;)

     • johan
       Posted 07/09/2011 at 3:49 am | Permalink | Reply

       …except when it comes to collaboration. MSFT manage sharing well, but they do poorly when it comes to online multi editing collaboration. MSFT will continue to do well for companies where the boss just needs to push information down, but if you’ve got knowledge workers who need to collaborate internally and externally then MSFT just doesn’t have anything to offer. I can, with one license of Google Apps, invite all my colleagues and all my partners to read and edit any document I have. With MSFT I would have to buy one sharepoint license for each person I want to share it with and yet editing from tablets or smart phones wouldn’t be possible. Finally: The day the average MSFT employee is working on the 365 platform only, then I believe MSFT will be ready to push down Google, but until then Google Apps will be the only 100% cloud option in my view

   • Devilinthedetail
     Posted 07/09/2011 at 4:02 am | Permalink | Reply

     Marcel, Microsoft were one of the first, credible organisations to provide cloud based services LONG before Google got to the table. Hotmail, Windows Live, Messenger……you can’t argue with that, and their numbers of users still leveraging this platform STILL outweighs those using Google’s Docs and mail platform, you can’t argue with that…..or you could try.

     You mentioned the writer couldn’t have used Google Apps to have written such an article. My question to you is have you used Office365 with Web Apps, SharePoint Online and Lync Online??

   • Devilinthedetail
     Posted 07/09/2011 at 4:02 am | Permalink | Reply

     Marcel, Microsoft were one of the first, credible organisations to provide cloud based services LONG before Google got to the table. Hotmail, Windows Live, Messenger……you can’t argue with that, and their numbers of users still leveraging this platform STILL outweighs those using Google’s Docs and mail platform, you can’t argue with that…..or you could try.

     You mentioned the writer couldn’t have used Google Apps to have written such an article. My question to you is have you used Office365 with Web Apps, SharePoint Online and Lync Online??

4. the boss
   Posted 06/09/2011 at 10:29 pm | Permalink | Reply

   RIchard Pratt was always one to pioneer and the legacy continues

5. Jimbo Jones
   Posted 07/09/2011 at 6:28 am | Permalink | Reply

   The ability to do real time collaboration and sharing must of been key. Office 365 still relies on the purchase of packaged office. Maybe that just wasn’t acceptable given the logistics involved in bringing the entire sites across AU + Asia up to the most recent version of office (which is already a year old). MS will for the next ten years try to sell you office, it’s key to their business model but with Google their business model is advertising. So Google Apps is free to grow without fear of cannibalisation.

   Maybe it is a mail offering. The Gmail webapp is so superior to 365′s web app it empowers all of Visy’s employees to have access to their mail no matter where they are, on any machine.

   • jakezbo
     Posted 07/09/2011 at 3:42 pm | Permalink | Reply

     You seem to forget or are ignoring Outlook Web Access.

     • Jumbo jones
       Posted 15/09/2011 at 1:34 pm | Permalink | Reply

       Nope, seen it and it’s horrible. Use it for more than an hour and it’s just so web 1.0 and really doesn’t ahve the feature set that Gmail has.

       • Renai LeMay
         Posted 16/09/2011 at 11:45 am | Permalink | Reply

         I dunno, the new OWA is actually pretty damn good — and it’s pretty hard to make an argument that Google Apps has more features than Microsoft’s alternative does. Having said that, I reckon 90% of features in Exchange/Outlook aren’t used by 90% of people, and I find the user interface in Google Apps so much better.

6. StartCast
   Posted 07/09/2011 at 8:38 am | Permalink | Reply

   im all in for google apps, more please, I believe small to large businesses should at least give it a go. In my experience it really can fulfill most companies needs at tiny fractions of the cost.

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