Google vs Microsoft Teams – it’s a matter of productivity and user focus

As an MD and former CEO of a few companies, I work to ensure we operator most effective and in a way that ensure we can continue to attract and develop talents across our organizations. I believe any MD must cater to how the it tools are being used.

I am also very focused on a few themes when it comes to modern IT:

• Mobile first.
• Productivity.
• Employee satisfaction.
• Empowerment.
• Data location.

I am a firm believer never to judge something before you try it out, and the same goes for productivity. We got acquired by Visma almost 6 months ago, and we switched to Google. This is my perspective – my personal perspective – when it comes to cost and productivity of it platform.

Choosing Microsoft

I founded Upodi and we built the company on a Microsoft cloud only infrastructure. This means no servers. No on-premises it. A rack of network switches, secure multi factor authentication in the cloud and a modern IT security policy that disables and enables features subject to BYOD or corporate provided devices.

I was skeptical introducing Microsoft Teams. Coming from employment at Microsoft and the internal 900.000 sharepoint sites – you simply do not want to replicate another 1990 ies intranet. I was so wrong. Although Teams built on some of the SharePoint remedies, Teams was different from day one.

• Immediately we cut emails by 60% and
• ..information search by 40% and
• ..that was before we really turned on the power of Teams.
• We gains one platform for internal communications, and one platform to home every business unit.

Google explains their alternative to Teams as Spaces. But if you really need to compare you need several additional tools such as Slack, Happeo, Mendix and Evernote just to compare a few. We have them all in Visma. And we constantly switch between different UIs, applications and tabs in the browser to keep up. Every additional tool require identity, a user and UI training. Microsoft Teams come with contextual unification of the experience.

Allow me to share a few examples:

• To drive corporate information and wikis, Visma have implemented Happeo. Google Spaces have no way to provide a communication platform close to Happeo. And whilst Happeo is a great intranet – you still implement a 1990 version of a site, where you need to search and click and search and click… of cause you get your daily digest on email. Just to delete it again.
• You cannot save in Google Spaces from Google Apps. You must first create the document and move it to spaces. Google enables that you can save in drive – either for teams or yourself. But not Google Spaces. The whole file experience somewhat off. As a startup we had to ensure brand. Enforce design rules and templates. Google seem to miss this totally – you are looking at your files, your drive or your document. No team or policy there.
• Google Spaces does not come with automation. You cannot assign a group email to it. You cannot enable apps, data or enhanced chat. Then you need to move to Slack. Microsoft Teams equivalent is channels and they are smart and contextual. You can add public email addresses, create automation, assign forms and lists or even integrate over 2.000 externals apps to post in a channel. Everything gets enables om your devices.
• We have quite a few small tools for various needs. Expense submission, parking, it requests etc. These small apps are implemented within hours using the platform behind Teams at no cost. We did it internally. There is no equivalent for Google. You need to code an apps or find a 3rd party platform. We built all tools into Teams and they immediately became mobile. They even came with approval subject to identity and managerial reference.
• We are a modern organization. Front line sales teams, customer success and support – and all employees are out of office now and then. Microsoft Teams come with a serious integration to telephony – yes you have to pay for the virtual landline – but group routing, IVR, hunt groups, delegation, and voice mail to mail is offered ot of the package. Truly powerful and once again contextual.
• Groups, teams, internal and external. Modern teams are hybrid. But organizations are always groups and more than the user. Google made a great platform for individuals, but it is very complex to share group email, team calendars or even provide ownership of files so they do not get deleted once a user is removed. Data in Teams is the organizations data. Data in Google seem to belong to the user.
• The information in Teams flow to each user like Facebook and Instagram. It is addictive and by no comparison a satisfaction driver. More than 50% of the information in our Teams was consume by a mobile device. And 18% was consume outside normal work hours. In reality that is employees reading about their work outside work hours. Utterly powerful.
• Adding teams, channels and apps by the user – not by IT. I kid you not, we had less than 10 it tickets the last 24 months. Before I had Google, Happeo and Slack working in Visma – I had 15 tickets open. And that is not the fault of Visma IT, but the consequences of application boundaries. I forgot how dreadful emails have come to be, it is impressive how must time it takes from you. Microsoft Teams built on a platform of empowerment. Even if you add apps or groups to Teams, relevant users are automatically added and you experience a feeling of inclusion.

Conclusion

If you are serious about team collaboration and productivity there is no comparison. Microsoft wins. Teams have become the hub of all dreams and offers a really amazing platform.

Yes Microsoft Office is a flight cockpit of features. But small things like Smartarts that can build organizational diagrams in minutes are much more productive than the 2 hours your spend om drag/drop/format/align as you prepare for the upcoming board meeting. The small issues with Google irritate many.

Every organization takes on a choice of IT platform. I am not blaming these decisions nor the people to choose. I understand why corporates turned to Google the last 10 years. But today’s user of IT is young, focus on work/life balance. Expects to work in hybrid offices following corona. And some even expect to work on holidays just to keep up.

Internet is not a world wide commodity. Offline is solid enabler to “focus time”, aka getting things done. Hybrid is my saviors many times.

It is easy to resent the cost of Microsoft. But when you stack up the platforms, Microsoft Teams is a bargain.

Summary