Major University Made Nice with Google Rather Than Microsoft
December 27, 2011
By Miguel Leiva-Gomez, TMCnet Contributor
Since the rise in popularity of cloud services, organizations throughout the world have been contemplating the best migration methods to export services into a cloud environment. Perhaps the most important decision the company has to make involves the provider that will host all the cloud services.
UC-Berkely recently had to make such a decision while contemplating moving email and calendar services to a cloud provider. Its choices: Google Apps and Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365. University of Washington also had to go through similar growing pains.
“While both products are feature rich and offer advantages over our current environment, the analysis concluded that the Google (News - Alert) offering was the better overall fit for the campus at this time,” wrote officials from Berkeley.
The university didn't just put up a press release, though. It went on a full-on detailed analysis of Google Apps and Office 365, putting them head-to-head and measuring their performance. Berkeley's analysis concluded that Office 365 performs better with its calendar, has a more flexible contract, and goes beyond expectations with security. The university, however, didn't see it as a good fit for its campus.
Berkeley chose Google Apps in its final decision. The most prominent reasons for this choice had to do with how easy it was to integrate the cloud software and how familiar students and faculty were with Gmail. Officials from the school have made it clear that Office 365 is still the new kid on the block. They also mentioned that the University of Nebraska did not adapt to Microsoft's cloud platform, perhaps for similar reasons.
Quoted from the report: “Google’s solution is optimized for web-based interaction. It is designed to be quickly provisioned and a migration to Google could begin more quickly than one to Office 365.”
It might take approximately six to ten weeks for the university to adapt all its systems and migrate to Google Apps.
Miguel Leiva-Gomez is a professional writer with experience in computer sciences, technology, and gadgets. He has written for multiple technology and travel outlets and owns his own tech blog called The Tech Guy, where he writes educational, informative, and sometimes comedic articles for an audience that is less versed in technology.
Edited by Rich Steeves