Google Workspace for Education vs. Kaltura Virtual Classroom

Google [Workspace for Education (formerly G Suite for Education)] is pretty darn good [at] meeting the needs for educators and students. It is not designed to run your business office, transportation group, or lunch services. It doesn't need to be good at those. Focus on teachers and students. They do that really, really well. The Google folks continue to add features that help serve teacher and students. For example, they have really done a good job of adding Google Meet features such as polling and breakout rooms. Those features required a paid subscription to Workspace, but it makes sense since those features compete with Zoom, which requires a subscription for those services.

Incentivized

Streaming Live content Organisation of content Selling content Authentication Containerisation Its good for receiving files into drop folders where clients can access to have it picked up by one of eight batch processes. We have the software, installed across 8 instances. This then extracts the media and pushes it through the Newrow, from Kaltura transcoding which will give us different flavours of video output files. It isn't very good for upscaling and really needs dedicated resource. It also doesn't upscale content.

Incentivized

• Email: The best email experience, period. It's fast, has the best mobile apps and tons of addons that extend it.
• Office suite: The Google editors might not have all the features of their MS Office counterparts, but they have most of them and the apps are surprisingly performant.
• Domain management: The Google Admin Console, coupled with the GAM command line tool, is very powerful, easy to use and simplifies any admin's work.

Incentivized

• consistent video environment.
• share videos across platforms and also have a Netfilx style of content.
• Asynchronus recording feature over MS stream.

Incentivized

• The admin console regularly feel sluggish
• Require third party tools to make changes to bulk devices
• Support could be a little better

Incentivized

• More authentication options
• containerisation
• more output formats
• Faster processing

Incentivized

Always up, never down. Compatible with so many different platforms, OSes, and tools. For instance, someone can be on a phone, tablet, laptop, and all of those tools are compatible with Google apps like Meet, Docs, Slides, and anything else Google based. It's flexiblity is fantastic and meets our changing hardware and software requirements

Incentivized

Google has a simpler approach to its apps. With all applications being online, things like auto-save being a default have been helpful for many staff in our organisation. Compare this to Microsoft where much of the admin has to be managed by the ICT Team, Google allows for a portion of control to the user to manage permissions of areas. This type of user empowerment helps people see how important ICT is to a business.

Incentivized

Not evaluated anything else

Incentivized

• There has been a steady evolution of new features coming out that reduced the need for third party tools
• We have been able to sign agreements to lock in annual renewal costs for up to 5 years
• It's a ubiquitous platform, finding support is generally pretty easy

Incentivized

• Internal end user experience increased.
• Less reliance on our internal custom solutions.
• Out sourced implementation and execution of tool.

Incentivized