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Google Apps for business

Steve_S_T

Well-Known Member
May 10, 2010
111
5
Just wondered if anybody here has fully committed their business (or works for a company that has) to the Premium Edition of Google Apps. If so can you give me any feedback on any real world issues that it has. Specifically I'm wondering how well it integrates with MS Office products. For example I receive a lot of Excel documents with embedded photos and .pdf files and will need to access and amend them. Similarly most of my customers use Excel and will need to be able to open a spreadsheet created by me in the Google system? Also can I migrate existing documents into Apps? I know these are fairly basic requirements and I would be surprised if Google haven't covered them, but are there any other issues that I need to consider before committing to the Gcloud?

Steve.
 
Our organization just completed moving 2000 users to Google apps Premier and we are quite pleased. Let me know what info you want.

The docs integration seems to be pretty good as you can save google spreadsheets as xls format before sending. PDF editing integration is still lacking but reading is fine.

Im here for any questions
 
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If you are looking for an app that can fully intergrate Microsoft product with your Android, I would advised getting Docs2Go. I have it and purchased the full version and it is well worth the money. They are always having sales for the full version (which I paid $5.99) and use it alot with my homework projects.

I had DocsToGo on my BlackBerry Marc and so I'm familiar with it. Google Apps gives me the opportunity to put work belonging to myself and my 2 colleagues into a virtual shared space that means we don't need to connect to a physical network drive in our office enabling us to work and share documents at all times from (virtually) anywhere including from my phone.
 
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Thanks all.

What kind of feedback are you getting from your Office using contacts outside of your own business Mothy? Are they having problems with any Google documents that you send to them?

not to much as we just converted a month ago. I know from my direct communication there is no impact (some extra steps on my sending end) as I save the doc down to my desktop as "office branding" before sending.
 
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Our organization just completed moving 2000 users to Google apps Premier and we are quite pleased. Let me know what info you want.

The docs integration seems to be pretty good as you can save google spreadsheets as xls format before sending. PDF editing integration is still lacking but reading is fine.

Im here for any questions

I'm curious about the differences between the premier version and the version you get with just a regular Google account. The version of Google Apps I get with just my regular GMail account is not that great. I won't even use it at home as OpenOffice is better and MS Office is way, way better. I'm guessing from your post that the Premier version is much better than the standard version non-paid users get. What's the difference?
 
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I'm curious about the differences between the premier version and the version you get with just a regular Google account. The version of Google Apps I get with just my regular GMail account is not that great. I won't even use it at home as OpenOffice is better and MS Office is way, way better. I'm guessing from your post that the Premier version is much better than the standard version non-paid users get. What's the difference?

Well docs is a evolving process (app) right now it really isn't meant for intricate complex documents at this time. The roadmap is very promising and to be honest they will be behind MS for a while probably because MS has been doing it for how many years and GDocs is very young. With that said we have already leveraged the other awesome features in docs.

1. Colaboration (being able to realtime edit with another person)
2. Forms, during the migration we leveraged a Google for which in essence was a survey done in a google doc that had realtime stats gathering on the back end loading in a google spreadsheet.

As an org we haven't "pushed" Gdocs but are letting users explore the options they have in using it. Will we get rid of Office products like MS or open Office no as they will probably offer more features, but for at least %75-%85 of the everyday word excel powerpoint users we could.
 
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Well docs is a evolving process (app) right now it really isn't meant for intricate complex documents at this time. The roadmap is very promising and to be honest they will be behind MS for a while probably because MS has been doing it for how many years and GDocs is very young. With that said we have already leveraged the other awesome features in docs.

1. Colaboration (being able to realtime edit with another person)
2. Forms, during the migration we leveraged a Google for which in essence was a survey done in a google doc that had realtime stats gathering on the back end loading in a google spreadsheet.

As an org we haven't "pushed" Gdocs but are letting users explore the options they have in using it. Will we get rid of Office products like MS or open Office no as they will probably offer more features, but for at least %75-%85 of the everyday word excel powerpoint users we could.

Fair enough. Your post made it sound like you had replaced Office completely with Google Apps which made me very interested. Perhaps I read your post wrong. I think you can use Sharepoint to do real time collaboration, but I'm not sure. None of our clients need/want that at this point.
 
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Fair enough. Your post made it sound like you had replaced Office completely with Google Apps which made me very interested. Perhaps I read your post wrong. I think you can use Sharepoint to do real time collaboration, but I'm not sure. None of our clients need/want that at this point.

Yeah sorry if it came across that way. To me Sharepoint is a endless money pit for collaboration though unless you only want the basics, because beyond that you need so many apps developers to extend the functionality. We picked Gapps to avoid that knowing that Google is always improving and keeping on the cutting edge of technology.
 
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Interesting stuff, thanks both. In fairness we don't stretch Excel very much at all, just a few simple formulas to add to total invoices and add VAT etc, so we don't need all the functionality anyway. When I tried Open Office I did miss one or two elements of MS Office, minor things really and I would anticipate similar things if switching to GApps. Plenty to ponder though so thanks again for the input.
 
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Interesting stuff, thanks both. In fairness we don't stretch Excel very much at all, just a few simple formulas to add to total invoices and add VAT etc, so we don't need all the functionality anyway. When I tried Open Office I did miss one or two elements of MS Office, minor things really and I would anticipate similar things if switching to GApps. Plenty to ponder though so thanks again for the input.

I have an app that uploads my mileage from my phone into a spreadsheet on Google Apps. I figured I'd make it easier on myself and have the spreadsheet add my mileage for each day and for the week. I spent about 2 mins trying to figure it out and couldn't. There was no AutoSum function like there is in OpenOffice or MS Office. I selected a row of cells and couldn't find a quick and dirty way to tell another cell that I wanted a sum of those cells. I'm confident that if I spent more than 2 mins looking for a solution I could've found one, but for me it was just easier to add the miles up in my head. In Open Office or MS Office I'd have selected a cell I wanted the result in, picked the AutoSum function, picked the cells I wanted to add and been done with it.
 
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I messed around with Microsoft's web apps the other day. I found them better than Google's apps, but not as good as Office running on a local computer. This is a space that MS could easily conquer if it plays it's cards right, but it probably won't.

Yeah nothing will probably ever duplicate that, the nice thing is there seems to be something for everyone's needs. I am really excited about where cloud computing will be in the next couple of years if not sooner.
 
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Yeah nothing will probably ever duplicate that, the nice thing is there seems to be something for everyone's needs. I am really excited about where cloud computing will be in the next couple of years if not sooner.

I am too, but I'm very uncertain of what it means for my job. I'm a computer tech who does desktop/server support. Where does that leave me if everyone moves to the cloud? If apps crash, they call the cloud people. They've got email in the cloud. They've got anti-virus in the cloud. If their internet crashes, they reboot their modem and/or call their ISP. They probably don't have a server in house. Where does that leave me?
 
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I am too, but I'm very uncertain of what it means for my job. I'm a computer tech who does desktop/server support. Where does that leave me if everyone moves to the cloud? If apps crash, they call the cloud people. They've got email in the cloud. They've got anti-virus in the cloud. If their internet crashes, they reboot their modem and/or call their ISP. They probably don't have a server in house. Where does that leave me?

As far as server and desktop for that matter learn VMware. Im a server admin and am chin deep in VMware all day. If is a high commodity in the server support line now. If you have questions or whatever let me know.
 
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