Google Workspace vs. Microsoft 365 vs. Microsoft Entra ID

I find that google workspace covers all the bases that I would need my day to day work solution to offer. Workspace is perfect if you're someone working in sales who regularly sets up and hosts meetings. The meet solution is reliable, the transcription through Gemini is almost always perfect, and the recording function is easy to use. Calendar backs this up well by being simple and easy to use. Although having the ability to share your calendar link for people to book in meetings would elevate this further. You can also never go wrong with Gmail, it is reliable, has strong spam filters and rarely ever goes down. On the flip side, despite Docs, Slides and Sheets covering the basic functionalities that you would need to create a good base level of documents, it does lack some advanced functionalities that other providers offer. Especially in Sheets, I use sheets regularly for importing and exporting data for cold outreach, it works perfectly fine for this, but if you were looking to start creating dashboards etc using sheets as the base for this, it can start to get a bit tricky and limited.

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Microsoft 365 would be well suited for medium to large enterprises. This is where there are several hundreds or thousands of people. Since most everyone has used one of the applications the learning curve would be reduced. Another reason would be the ability to implement security measures to prevent access to sensitive data. This could justify the cost of an Enterprise license.

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That one is tough. It's just easy to integrate the sign-on portion with other products from other companies. Like BluePoint or Podint. It's very easy to integrate the user information with others. Using Android ID to register an application with other companies' applications.

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• Google Calendar...amazing. I don't need to ask team members when they're busy anymore and play this game of bouncing times back and forth. All I need to do is enter their email address and it shows my calendar and theirs side by side and then select the day and time I find that works best for the both of us.
• I actually prefer Google Meet over Zoom. Zoom bogs down my computer and I find their UI overcomplicated for what it actually does. Google Meet is simple and does practically everything Zoom does without needing to pay any extra money.
• Sheets integrates with our CRM (Copper) so it's perfect for us. Being able to export information out of our CRM into sheets and then create pivot tables from that data makes our lives a million times better.

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• Chat with teams and the integrations with the other apps, and many more smaller ones, like to-dos, news, and the recent Outlook integration.
• Easy embedding on SharePoint to broadcast all the content created in the different tools.
• The office package is still robust with the good things from the past and new additions.

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• The first thing is that it's a really good platform to make a whole inventory of your hardware and software that you already have in the organization. It's very simple. It's very easy to look at what you have in the whole organization. And after that, start applying, for instance, some policies, some solutions in terms of zero trust access using MFA as a second form of authentication. So, these are the ways we use the MTIV platform.

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• I have several Workspace accounts, and it can be kind of annoying to switch between them. For example, if I click in my work email but my Chrome defaults to my personal Workspace, I have to open the file differently or log in and out of the other account.
• Meet is my least favorite feature. I find it very subpar to Zoom in both ease and picture resolution. It's harder to tell when you're sharing your screen and you can't see comments if you're presenting.
• Google My Business can be difficult to navigate. I frequently forget where features are and have to hunt around for them.

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• Fix Outlook. It crashes constantly, uses way too many resources, and freezes to the point that I need to shut it down in the Task Manager.
• Excel could use an easier numbering function. I used to drag down, and it would number the cells ascending. Somewhere, it lost this function and just copied the same number down the column, which is kind of useless.
• Someone needs to create (and include) a quick and easy cheat sheet for commonly used formulas. It would be nice if a drop-down would let you choose a formula (without all the prior programming).

• The only area I would suggest is the name change. Microsoft rebrands a lot, but the apps do the same things, and it gets confusing. If you spend five years learning Microsoft Entra ID or its previous name, and then they change it, you have to adjust. Rebranding app names inside Microsoft Entra ID can be confusing, and the migration is slow. They're trying to upgrade things, but communication has improved a little.

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There is no better solution for cloud storage and real time collaboration. The amount of features included in G Suite is unmatched and out of other things we’ve tried over the years, nothing comes close to being as great of a tool.

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I am completely satisfied with the product, and helps me on a daily basis. I do not the exact cost (it is not a cheap suite) but on the medium and long term the return on investment is guaranteed.

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Entra ID is a vital part of our Identity management/administration. With the integrations it has to other Microsoft products, setup and configuration is a breeze. Additionally, Microsoft has been around a long time and have the resources to ensure this product is stable and secure for many years to come. We know it will evolve with time to provide us what we need as technology changes.

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On the user end, it's great, probably some of the most user friendly products out there. On the admin side, it can get a little more arcane, but it's still better than a lot of other services. At worst I wrangle some CSVs to perform mass changes, but it's a far cry from the days of Powershell scripts or purely manual entry.

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Because it's efficient and cost effective. I can work offline even when there is no Internet or I'm travelling. I am able to meet deadlines because it is user friendly which makes it easy to use. I make good use of the cloud storage as well so I have all my files in one place.

Simply because of what I mentioned earlier, the feature set sort of keeps changing and they do a lot of, they integrated with a lot of the other tools and so for users who are not as well seasoned, it may be a little bit more complicated for them to begin working within the tool.

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There has been a handful of outages but they have been either minimal or rarely severe

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I could probably rate this a 10 but I'm always conservative on giving out perfect scored bt performance has not been a problem for us using Entra ID.

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I have not had to use much support for G Suite, but I imagine it would be a great service, as is everything else that Google provides. I've searched for questions through the help center, and that was easy to use and easy to find. I'm sure I would have no complaints.

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Over the past 8 years of using Microsoft 365, I have noticed that they change vendors often. This always leads to a poor experience in the beginning, then levels out after some time for the company to get things worked out. As a customer, it is really frustrating because I don't have time when something isn't working to have them "look into my issue" and get back with me. They have even closed a ticket I specifically told them to keep open. Your applications are only as good as the support.

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Microsoft has offered Azure Active Directory as a solution for a couple of decades now, so they have seen and anticipated almost any issue that an organization may face and can therefore help. The cloud offering of Azure Active Directory offers some additional "self healing" or monitoring services that can minimize the need for a service call. However, as with most large companies supporting a fast growing market, there may be some gaps in service knowledge (and particularly processing) from the front line / tier one staff as they follow a corporate script at first contact.

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Most training was internally produced

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nothing to say

Everything works and I use it all the time.

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Make sure you use a good partner. Our implementation was a bit longer and more problematic than we expected. Our partner got it done, but, in my opinion, some of their inexperience and staffing issues were evident.

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Google got a good jumpstart on building out a more comprehensive and consolidated platform. Microsoft has been around such a long time that they still have some archaic tech debt in their platform. Dropbox feels like it decided to pursue the more comprehensive suite a little late, and only seems to appeal to smaller businesses instead of being able to scale as big. Google Workspace covers all of the bases well enough with good add-on or enhanced functionality that satisfies the needs of different businesses across the spectrum.

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Microsoft 365 works together well with other apps and performs well as it is the standard setter in many settings. Salesforce is good at what it excels and functions at. The two products do not compete in the same field and are good complementary tools to achieve project management goals and tasks.

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My dad was a sales engineer for a competitor, which is SalePoint Identity IQ or whatever they're calling it this year. They complement each other well. It's just that with each new year, with each new iteration, there are more duplicative capabilities. So I've seen some organizations saying, "Well, now I can do things like access reviews, onboarding, offboarding, and identity workflows, all within just Microsoft Entra ID." The solution is that you get out of it what you put into it. If an organization is willing to invest in SalePoint, there are more granular capabilities that I've seen success with, but I would say the core, like 70- 80%, Microsoft Entra ID is able to cover it with not nearly as much identity investment performance. I think you get to functional capabilities faster with something like Microsoft Entra ID.

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Scalability is pretty trival for Entra ID. It's not difficult to manage a few or many accounts.

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• Google Workspace costs us a little more, but our inboxes are safer for it.
• Our email deliverability has improved significantly. No more lost or bounced emails with our invoices attached. Workspace helps us get paid!
• Our support requests for undelivered email has disappeared.

• 1600+ users have adopted Microsoft 365 in our company. We even created enablement sharepoint pages for every department and for new hires to go to as the source of truth or see what ERGs to join.
• Huge time saved with the meeting scheduling assistant especially when trying to book time with busy leaders.
• Copilots meeting summaries and email summaries are amazing. We can even use your own AI within Teams and ask it questions about our customer accounts, HR questions, etc. right within the Teams platform.

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• I don't know. I think we could not do without it. Also, because we have limitations in other systems, like our HR system, which cannot store externals. So for us, Microsoft Entra ID is the master data where we keep everyone connecting to our network. So it's difficult to quantify. It's simply indispensable.

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