Phil Tate Presents on the Benefits of Moving to Cloud-Based Office Applications

A big thank you to Phil Tate from ‘Act on Insight’, who on Friday presented to Equinox IT on the benefits of organisations moving off desktop office applications and onto web-based (or cloud-based) office applications. Phil was previously the IT Strategy Manager for a large New Zealand organisation, where he was a key driver in their move off Microsoft Office desktop applications and onto Google Apps. This blog post summarises some of Phil’s key points from his presentation.

Situation

In his role of IT Strategy Manager, Phil was faced with a burning platform. Their Microsoft Office products needed upgrading or would no longer be supported. Their previous experience in upgrading to Windows XP had been expensive and problematic. Upgrading their desktop applications would also be expensive and done for support reasons did not appear to offer significant value to the business. The existing desktop application environment also presented a number of constraints, including the inability to conveniently access email when outside of the office environment. Looking for a move cost effective solution, greater convenience, and improved mobility with their office applications, the organisation started to explore other options.

Pilot and Implementation

After exploring the options of HyperOffice, Microsoft Office Web Apps and Google Apps, the organisation settled on Google Apps and ran a successful pilot with a group of key users. The use of Google Apps was then rolled out across the organisation.

Benefits

Phil presented the many benefits realised from the move to Google Apps:

• Cost Savings – at a modest annual fee per person, moving to Google Apps generated significant savings for the organisation.
• Improved Security – counter to common expectation, the organisation’s data is considered to be more secure in the cloud than on their own systems. Google’s core business is clearly IT and they have dedicated teams focusing on security.
• Mobility – with Google Apps and their data in the cloud, the employees can access information they require from anywhere they have internet access.
• Support – any issues encountered on Google Apps will affect many organisations and so are generally resolved quickly.
• Innovation – new features, such as video on the desktop, just appear and are available to everyone immediately – no need to roll out new features and product innovations.
• Collaboration – native web-based tools, rather than desktop tools ported to the web, are well placed to take advantage of internet style collaboration, such as chat and video.
• Archiving – no need to archive information (such as emails into .pst files) as all data is readily available on the cloud.
• Disaster Recovery – the organisation’s Christchurch operations were back up and running in a matter of days following the February earthquake, in part due to Google Apps and associated data being available in the cloud.

Considerations

• While Google Docs is clearly not as powerful as Microsoft Word, the standard user does not need all of the features of Word and Google Docs is generally suitable. People with specific needs can still request specialist software.
• Google Apps, in particular Gmail, work differently than the Microsoft Office applications and some training during the transition may be necessary.
• The organisation’s data is not stored in New Zealand, this was a consideration but not a show stopper to the decision to move to Google Apps.
• The Southern Cross cable that provides internet connection between New Zealand and the rest of the world was considered prior to moving to Google Apps, but it was decided that any outage due to this cable was a risk that the organisation could live with.

Overall, Phil indicated that the move to Google Apps was successful in delivering the benefits sought. With continued pressure on organisations to make cost savings and with the continued move to mobility, he anticipates that more organisations will move to Google Apps or other web-based office applications in the future.