Google Apps as an alternative to Microsoft Office in a multinational company: the GAPS project
Luc Bourquin · RERO DOC (Universität Bern) · 2010
A large multinational Company is launching the GAPS Project to assess the suitability of Google Apps as an alternative to the current email, collaboration and office toolset. In order to make a decision, the company needs recommendations based on a complete project assessing the Google Apps offering, taking into account the company’s specificities. The company currently uses Microsoft Office with Exchange. Identified problems include the cost of licenses, their dependency on Microsoft, the complex licensing model, and concerns about the use of the current solutions by the contractors. The GAPS Project describes the steps that the company should follow. In particular, a pilot phase should be conducted with users representing the diversity of the company’s users in terms of geographical location and business lines. Success criteria have been defined. They include contractual aspects, business requirements, financial aspects, support, operational aspects, security, and user satisfaction. Pilot results will provide a classification of the company users according to the ability of Google Apps to provide solutions corresponding to their requirements. Google Apps Premier Edition is a web application suite for businesses. It offers an email storage capacity of 25 GB per user and a Service Level Agreement describing 99.9% uptime guarantee. Advantages for the company are new business opportunities, such as the real time editing feature and the ability to share a document with an external partner. The messaging service allows the company users to save time, thanks to the large storage capacity and to the well organized mailboxes. The licenses are less expensive than those of Microsoft. Google Apps can be made available to the contractors, as they don’t require tools other than a messaging service. However, advanced users would suffer from the lack of functionality and from compatibility issues, especially when opening Microsoft Office documents with rich content. Frequent travelers and users in locations with unreliable Internet connections would be less productive. Among the disadvantages, we note that a central administration team needs to be created, as the administrative control panel doesn’t offer any granularity. Depending on the potential number of Google Apps users, important savings can be realized as described in the financial analysis, taking into account the costs due to a mixed Google-Microsoft environment.