Best ways to reduce costs when transitioning from Microsoft products to Workspace? | C2C Community
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Best ways to reduce costs when transitioning from Microsoft products to Workspace?

  • 4 August 2021
  • 7 replies
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Userlevel 7
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Hi everyone! In my past role, I saw firsthand the unexpected costs of transitioning from one suite of products to another (namely, Microsoft to Google). There was total licensing costs for the users, then there was the SAML costs, then there was the issue of who should and should not receive Google Enterprise...needless to say, the savings from changing from one product to another got smaller and smaller….

 

What would you have suggested as a better approach?

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Best answer by Christian-Ahlin 4 August 2021, 22:20

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Userlevel 3
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That's because you don't see the forest for all the trees.

The big savings from Google workspace comes from Chromebooks/ChromeOS where you don't need antivirus, software distribution, software inventory, 20% of Microsoft IT resources managing devices and especially remove cryptolockers as a threat.

Security on Windows machines are like trying to stop a Brazilian parade by asking nicely. And as long as you base your IT-platform on Windows applications (because come on, O365 is a joke), you will forever be a business with legacy IT at the foundation.

Userlevel 7
Badge +26

Haha! Thanks for that visual, @Christian-Ahlin! So many organizations don’t have the wherewithal to think this way, unfortunately. That’s a life lesson in itself, huh? Think big, so you don’t end up having to buy your way out of every corner you get stuck in.

Userlevel 3
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Not Google related, but the book "The milky way" by Cecilia Nordén will elevate you out of the swamp of incompetence.

There are good public PowerPoints and videos on milky way (just add "enterprise architecture" or "irm"), but the book has all details and step by steps etc.

Involve upper management when drawing yours, otherwise you'll get fired for surpassing them in knowledge and disrupt the power balance. Serious warning, this book isn't the survival biased word-farting the rest of management literature is.

Userlevel 7
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Hahahaha!!! “Swamp of incompetence”! Thanks for the reading material. I have to take a look!

Userlevel 5
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From what I can tell switching from one productivity suite to another simply to save money will be disappointing. After all Google Workspace isn’t really that much cheaper than Microsoft. 

But switching to Google often means changing the IT landscape: getting rid of the Microsoft Exchange and file servers somewhere in the basement and entrusting Google to take care of the management of the infrastructure.

Also the “old” MS way of working is asynchronous and worked better when everyone was together on-premise working on their company computers.

We all know that has changed for most companies.

Userlevel 7
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Thanks for that perspective, @chanelgreco. Side note: if you all want to make a lot of money, American school districts really need help thinking big picture about making technical changes. They have the funds, but not the clear direction.

Userlevel 7
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If I think thoughtfully about the last companies I did projects for, I can recall there is still a lot of MS Office suites installed locally in employees' computers. Although all of them have been trained to use Google Workspace or even O365 in a web browser.

For me, it’s clear the savings of going with a web browser strategy. The computers don’t need to be oversized to accommodate the native OS version of the programs and the IT department does not have to maintain those programs. not to mention problems with different versions of Office, or explaining the difference between doc and docx (so everyone ends up saving with .doc “just in case”) and there is no way to move forward.

There’s really a lot more in Google’s workspace ecosystem than docs, sheets, and slides but with only changing from local installed Microsoft programs to use those Google’s Workspace tools, I found it that I could save a lot of money (although may not be directly tied to licenses).

If you stay with O365 even online, people will find a way to work the “old Microsoft way” because that’s what they had been doing for years.

​and as @marissa.piazza  says, “They have the funds, but not the clear direction”. If a company changes to Google Workspace just to save money on licenses the project is going to fail, companies need to think about what more they could achieve after the migration that were unable to do before.

Cheers,
Alfons

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