Feature
Sharegate, which has built its business around Office 365 and SharePoint migration, expanded its portfolio this morning with a tool for moving data from Google Apps to Office 365.
The release targets organizations that store their data in Google Drive — the storage app in Google Apps — particularly those that might be looking for a better collaboration experience than they are getting with Google Drive.
Why Leave Google Drive?
Google built Google Drive as a file storage and synchronization service where users can store, share, edit and collaborate on files in the cloud.
While it works well for individuals and many enterprises too, Benjamin Niaulin, marketing vice president with Montreal-based Sharegate, pointed out that the Google Drive experience is more user focused than enterprise focused.
“There are a number of things missing. In Google Drive, all the documents are linked to individual users so if the user gets deleted or leaves the company, all the documents that are associated with that person are gone, they get deleted, they disappear," Niaulin said.
“So in terms of enterprise collaboration and the things that you can do, Office 365 is going it makes a lot of sense.”
Of course Niaulin has an interest in saying this, as Sharegate is a Microsoft Gold partner that spent a lot of last year developing its relationship with Microsoft, particularly around Office 365.
Microsoft vs. Google
The release of the new tool comes at a time when Google and Microsoft continue to slug it out for dominance in the productivity space.
From the sidelines, it looks as if no one will win any time soon, but evidence suggests Office 365 is pulling ahead.
Leaving aside the edge Office 365 has over Google Drive in terms of functionality, adoption of Office 365 has been growing rapidly.
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In August 2015, independent research undertaken by Bitglass showed enterprise adoption of Office 365 had grown by 300 percent in the 12 months preceding.
This dovetailed with other research by Skyhigh a month earlier that estimated Office 365 deployment in the enterprise to be as high as 87.3 percent.
Then in September 2014, Google rebranded its enterprise business as Google for Work in what appeared to be a tacit acceptance of Office 365’s dominance in the enterprise.
But don't write off Google too quickly.
“Across the board, 23 percent of organizations still have Google Apps. It’s not like Google is a big loser here,” Rich Campagna, vice president of products at Bitglass, told CMSWire at the time.
Functionality at a Price
Sharegate's new migration tool will allow IT administrators to extend their migration from Google Drive to OneDrive for Business, while keeping authorship, versioning and other characteristics for the end users, who will find everything as they left it at the destination.
Whether making it easier to migrate will make Office 365 more attractive remains to be seen, as its price tag might stand in the way for those working in the less expensive Google Apps.
