Consulting firm ditches Google Apps for BPOS

5

Well, well, well. Looks like it’s not only Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise customers who are dumping their collaboration suites for the Microsoft option. According to a case study published on Microsoft’s site on 14 July and quickly and mysteriously removed, Redmond has pulled one back from arch-rival Google.

We’ve still got a copy of the now-deleted case study, which concerns a Melbourne-headquartered IT consulting firm named Enterprise Architects, which apparently has about 100 staff. Some quotes from the document:

“To try and deliver collaboration resources to its widely distributed consultants, Enterprise Architects adopted the Google Apps suite of online messaging and productivity services. But after almost a year, the company was still struggling to integrate Google Apps with its IT infrastructure, and to manage and share knowledge across the organization. In November 2010, just before it had to renew its Google Apps agreement, Enterprise Architects switched its entire PC environment to the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite.”

“With Google Apps, administrative staff found it difficult to organize a meeting or attach a candidate’s resume when scheduling an interview”

“With Google Apps, we had some ability to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets,” says [Craig Martin, Chief Architect and Director of Products and Innovation at Enterprise Architects], “but not the functionality we were familiar with to edit, format, import, export, or otherwise make spreadsheets, documents, emails, and presentations presentable for customers.”

“When we took into account the extra services we had to adopt to fill the gaps in Google Apps, our business case showed that Business Productivity Online would be substantially less expensive,” says Martin.

We can’t say we’re surprised this sort of thing is happening from time to time. An enterprise IT architectural consulting firm, getting fed up with the technical limitations of Google Apps? Who would have thought? As we’ve reiterated several times, Microsoft’s alternate Outlook/Exchange environment is more suitable for organisations with complex requirements and jurisdictional hosting difficulties (although that doesn’t cover most organisations, we should note). Especially now that Microsoft can do everything “in the cloud”.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons

5 COMMENTS

  1. Sure you don’t get the familiar Word/Excel but “administrative staff found it difficult to organize a meeting” …. really!

    I find Google mail and calendaring a refreshing departure from Outlook. The best thing I ever did was get rid of outlook and switch to the web client.

  2. If administrative staff found it difficult to arrange a meeting in Google Apps, can’t help but wonder just how professional the company really is.

  3. A common mistake I’ve found with SME’s “going to google” is that one person assumes because it’s right for them as an individual “it’s right for the company”.

    Google Apps can’t really operate in a complex corporate environment (not yet anyway). Sadly “complex” for Google is “I have two EA’s who want to book meetings for me but i can’t let them see my email”.

    I suspect a few people need to get a bloody nose and Google will copy their way out of the mess. MS sorted this out years ago. Too bad if you’re the one with the bloody nose…

Comments are closed.