Google Apps vs Windows Live Office

We continue our series about how Microsoft doesn't like Google. At this time - the remake of the old TV series Moonlighting with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, starring Google as Bruce Willis. It's not just funny movie about Google Apps, but also a good opportunity to practice your English (if you need). And we hope that Google will fire back with its own quirky advert.

While the deal between Google and General Motors is still unpublic, Google has officially signed another large Google Apps customer - the largest Spanish banking group BBVA. BBVA plans to implement Google Apps for 110 thousand employees in 26 countries up to the end of 2012. Thus, Google has updated its personal SaaS record (in terms of project volume). It's interesting that BBVA moves to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange (so Office 365 loses again). Besides, this deal will be a huge step forward for Google and for the whole SaaS industry because it's the largest SaaS project in the banking sector. After all, we all know how carefully banks  protect their commercial data. See also the Top 5 largest SaaS projects.

According to the latest insider information, GM is already about to move from their current collaboration system Lotus Notes to Google Apps. It's about 100 thousand seats. At first this information appeared earlier this month - when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and General Motors signed a preliminary agreement according to which GM will test Google Apps and Google has to meet some additional requirements. But GM haven't made the official statement yet. If all goes well, then Google will update its personal record on the SaaS project size. So far, the largest Google Apps customer is Valeo - 30 thousand users. And of course, it's a big victory for the SaaS market. But it's not clear yet what additional requirements GM presented to Google. Won't Google transform the service in favor of big business and make it less usable for small business?

One advantage of Google's main advantages over Facebook is that the search giant can perfectly integrate businesses and individual users (clients) in the single network (Google +). And if it succeed, Google+ will become the successful platform for advertising, unlike Facebook, which hasn't achieved the significant progress in the advertising incomes yet. The first big step in this direction has been done by Google today: from now Google Apps Now users can log in to Google+ under their corporate accounts and use Google+ for business needs. First, Google+ can serve as a social layer via creation of business/project groups (circles) with employee profiles. Second, it can be used as an intranet microblogging system for discussions and file sharing (like Chatter, Yammer ...). Third, it allows to search and support customers via Google+. But of course, the killer Google+ for business is its video chat app Google Hangouts.

Google Apps for Business gets a new interesting feature - the read (i.e. open) notification. It works this way: you send a message and if you don't receive the reply for a long time, you can open the message and check whether the recepient has read it or not. The notification can be enabled by Google Apps account admin for all users and works only for internal communications (within the domain). Thus, you can make internal collaboration more strict and possibly more effective. Because employee, that sends an important task via email can control its reception and if necessary can call the recipient and ask to check the mail.

During the last 2 weeks Google has almost made another revolution on the Web. No one expected that in the near future someone will be able to break the social monopoly of Facebook, but it looks like Google will succeed at this time. And because today in order to be successful, any business should be a part of the Social Web, then, want-or-not you have to sort out how to use Google+. Fortunately, there is still enough time, because the network is now working in a half-closed mode (registration is by invitation only). Additionally, the key business features will appear only in the second half of the year. But meanwhile you can get used to them:

It wasn't so easy to create a list of the largest SaaS projects. Because though SaaS vendors would like to promote themselves, they often have no clearance from customer to go public on their deployments. Sometimes, when a dispute on the largest projects starts, they claim that they have a customer with XXX users, but don't tell what customer and provide no proof. Therefore, our rating is based on unverified information. However, it is interesting that neither Salesforce nor Google Apps are included in it. And four out of five deployments - are talent management (or human capital - HRM) systems:

Today Microsoft has rolled out the second update to its online office suite Office Web Apps and made it available in 7 more countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia and Switzerland. In the first update in August some very useful features appeared: charts and auto fill in Excel Web App and free clip-art gallery in PowerPoint Web App. Today update is also very interesting. Now you can embed PowerPoint presentations as well as Excel charts and tables to any site or blog. If you insert a table from Excel - visitors can change cell values to recalculate results, but the source excel-file in your account will not change. Conversely, if you change something in the original excel-file - table or chart in the widget will be updated too, so visitors always see the latest information. According to Microsoft, during the first 100 days from the release, Office Web App where used by over 20 million people.

Yesterday, Microsoft officially launched Windows Live Office with Office Web Apps for english-speaking users (US, UK, Canada & Ireland). But anyone can already use them by switching the language in the Live ID account to English. Documents can be accessed in Office menu or SkyDrive menu. To understand why, read our review. Unfortunately, the first impression of Windows Live Office - is negative. Of course, we knew that online office apps will be light. And the fact that there are no diagrams and no cell autofill in the Excel Web App, and no rich paste in OneNote Web App, and no file move between folders in Live Office - all these is not disappointing. But the main thing that we expected - correct Word formatting support - actually doesn't work.

Microsoft has done a great job to confuse users with their online office applications. Office Live, Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business, Live Folders, Foldershare, Live Docs, SkyDrive, Live Mesh, Docs.com, Office Web Apps - a lot of similar in functionality or name services, formed in result of numerous acquisitions and rebrandings. Taking into account the existence of Exchange and Sharepoint SaaS versions (BPOS), it becomes a mystery - what Microsoft's online office suite is and what it's target audience. The new version of Windows Live Wave 4 (which includes the online office) is trying to bring this chaos into order, however, again  by the numerous mergers and renamings. Let's try to understand all this stuff.

At last (after the July announcement) Microsoft is opening web-based Office 2010  applications to beta-testers. The web Office will have a long official title: Microsoft Office Web Applications. As we already informed, it will be available in two editions: Free and Business. The business version will work on top of SharePoint 2010 (behind the firewall). And free version will work on top of the online file storage service  Windows Live SkyDrive (that provides 25Gb for free). Yesterday one thousand of SkyDrive happy users already got an access to online Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. And their reviews are quite different - from "awesome" to "tedious". Here are the most interesting points: